Sacramental Reading- Erasmus (revised)

71 3. Humanist Reading: From the “Booke of the Crucyfixe” to “Christ Himself” The image of Christ as a book—the Incarnate Word made material text—has a long history in the Christian tradition, from its initial appearance in John’s Gospel (“In the beginning was the Word”), to its widespread dissemination by Jerome’s Vulgate translation (late 4th-century), down to the late medieval Dictionarium seu reportorium morale (ca. 1355) of Pierre Bersuire.1 This tradition sidesteps the problem of translation, of course, given the cultural uproar that Erasmus’ bilingual edition of the New Testament had provoked in 1516, where he translated the Greek logos printed in the left column as sermo (speech) in the Latin of the facing column. In a word— literally one word—Erasmus had overturned eleven centuries of tradition by reducing Jerome’s Eternal verbum (“In principio erat verbum”) to the time-bound sermo, “a living” and deeply human “utterance which includes Christ’s recorded (written) words yet is infinitely renewed in their re-utterance by readers of subsequent ages.”2 By his fidelity to the Greek original, the humanist scholar had effectively dragged the Eternal and unchanging Word down from Heaven and limited His divine power to the contingency of the human condition. To orthodox churchmen, it was a radical assault on the majesty of Heaven. Bishop Fisher’s “Booke” The Bishop of Rochester, John Fisher was a humanist sympathizer and an early admirer of Erasmus, and as Chancellor of Cambridge University, had even appointed him to a teaching post in 1511.3 As Charles Nauert observes, Though most of his biographers emphasize his activity as a teacher of 72 Greek, it is almost certain that Bishop Fisher also arranged for him to hold the Lady Margaret professorship of divinity and that he lectured on theology as well as Greek. He did not enjoy his stay there (1511-14), but he was given a free hand, being allowed to lecture on the letters of St Jerome, which he was currently editing, rather than on the scholastic textbooks.4 But after the publication of Erasmus’ New Testament in 1516, and the controversy over his translation of the Greek logos, Bishop Fisher seems to have lost some of his early enthusiasm for studia humanitatis.5 Some fifteen years later, in a sermon preached on Good Friday, ca. 1531, he replied publicly, if still discreetly and obliquely, to Erasmus, whose “zealous” supporter6 he had once been. Taking for his text the Book of Ezekiel, chapter 2, he began to speak about the Word in terms that put the Son well beyond the faculty of speech (sermo) and reasserted his identity as the Eternal Word (verbum). In Fisher’s evocation of Ezekiel, the hand of God appears to the prophet where, “lo, a roll of a book was therein; And he spread it before me; and it was written within and without: and there was written therein lamentations, and mourning, and woe” (2. 910). The writings of Ezekiel that the bishop describes as “a roll of a book” could not, however, have been a roll made of animal skins. He imagines it as being “written within and without,” unlike ancient Hebrew scrolls with a single written surface.7 Furthermore, the bishop quotes less of Ezekiel’s scroll in forty pages of sermon than I have just done, marvelling all the same that, “This was a wonderfull booke, and much to be merueiled vpon.”8 Indeed, “merueiled,” “meruayling,” and “marueylous” appear seven times in the first two paragraphs of the sermon, most likely to inculcate a sense of wonder and spirit of devotion among his auditors that, “if wee 73 doe exercise our admiration, wee shall come to wonderfull knowledge.” Contrary to the humanist’s sermo, the late medievalist’s Word still functions outside the context of human speech as the transcendent and eternal logos. Furthermore, the rhetor, making effective use of anaphora (or repetition in parallel syntax), begins eleven consecutive sentences, each its own self-contained paragraph, with the question, “Is it not a wonderfull thyng,” ritually repeated in a manner parallel to the repetition of physical gestures such as kneeling (e.g., at the Communion Rail), prostrating (as in prayer at the mosque), or rhythmic nodding (as in prayer at Jerusalem’s Wailing Wall)—all rigidly prescribed and enacted gestures meant to ensure the ritual’s success. In the language of psychologist Nicholas Hobson, such ritual gestures are “determined by their physical and motoric features, such as the level of repetition and sequencing of movement.”9 And the type of psychological effects on participants in repetitive ritual actions can range from heightened “attention,” to “heightened value or meaning,” to a real sense of connection with “something that is bigger than themselves” (Hobson, 4). In his sermon, the bishop’s rhythmic repetition of “a wonderfull thing” is similarly designed to perform the action that it names (a performative utterance).10 He seeks to induce wonder in his auditors at how this “book” now summoned up from the prophet’s vision has magically turned into a crucifix, beyond the realm of human speech. And more wondrous still is the manner in which that leather “roll” with which the homilist began is mysteriously transformed into a codex “booke” with “boardes” and “leaues” that can be “opened & spreade” until “the leaues be cowched vpon the boardes”: But you maruell peraduenture why I call the crucifix a booke? I will 74 now tell you the consideracion why? [sic] A booke hath boardes, leaues, lynes, wrytinges, letters booth small and great. First I saye that a booke hath two boardes: the two boardes of this booke is the two partes of the crosse, for when the booke is opened & spread, the leaues be cowched vpon the boardes. And so the blessid [sic] body of Christ was spred vpon the crosse. The leaues of this booke be the armes, the handes, legges, and feete, with the other members of his most precious and blessed body. Never anye Parchement skynne was more strayghtlye stretched by strength vpon the tentors then was this blessed body vpon the crosse. (393-94) As he leaves off rhythmic repetition of eleven consecutive sentence-paragraphs, his segmentation of descriptive parts has now established a poetic conceit worthy of Donne or Crashaw, as James Kearney perceptively remarks (7). Indeed, its metonymies11 are as sensual as they are apt; here, the Ignatian style of meditation systematically unveils the presence of the spiritual in a material object of devotion. Just as “this booke” is imagined as a medieval codex— not the “roll” or Hebrew scroll of Ezekiel—but “written with in and without,” on both sides in the manner of a parchment codex, so too, “the sonne of God which by the holie Ghost was written in the inward syde of thys parchment” as “the word was in the begynning before all creatures”—so, too, the miraculous “Godheade of Christe was couered and hidde vnder the lykenesse of man” (Fisher 394). If the human nature of Christ now appears in the verso—the “hairy” side of its parchment surface—the mysterious divine nature is then written on the smooth 75 recto side in “but one worde,” the verbum of “In principio erat verbum” (394). Or, in the sensory terms of Kearney’s usage, “Playing upon the figure of Christ as Word become flesh, Fisher makes the vision of an incarnate text come to life through a visceral conflation of body and book, through an insistence that books are flesh” (6). Except for one disconcerting fact: the “Word become flesh” now appears in the rigor mortis of those “boardes” as a lifeless corpse, much as the “roll” containing the prophet Ezekiel’s words has also been nailed to the boards on which the codex pages are bound. Is it Christ, or is it Ezekiel “spred vpon the crosse”? The reality is that the homily has left the Book of Ezekiel far behind, rendering the book irrelevant. It is no longer what the Word speaks through the prophet’s lips, or what is written on the page from which the bishop reads. For, much as the bread is replaced by the body of Christ in the ritual of the Mass, the book is replaced in the sermon by the Word made lifeless flesh. In terms of his theology, the bishop’s meditation upon the “marvellous” nature of the Son of God’s sacrificial body is meant instead to recall the hope of Heaven in that sacrifice: “Thus who that list with a meeke harte, and a true fayth, to muse and to maruayle of this most wonderfull booke (I say of the Crucifixe) hee shall come to more fruitefull knowledge, then many other which dayly studie vpon their common bookes” (Fisher 390). Reading the book is simply preparatory to the rite. Moreover, the reading of “common bookes”—common in the sense of the vernacular text printed in the common tongue—will not, in the bishop’s doctrine, bring salvation to anyone.12 Only “thys booke” that isn’t a book at all, “thys booke of the Crucyfixe” (396), “may suffice for the studie of a true christian man, all the dayes of his life. In this boke [sic] he may finde all things that be necessarie to the health of his soule” (390). No other “reading” is necessary, for no other “book” would be effectual. On this wise, the threat of humanist books such as a Greek or 76 vernacular Bible to the Church’s power is effectively marginalized. The sermon is a categorical denial of the value of humanist reading. Bishop Fisher’s own reading is authoritative, however, to the extent that it centres not on historical, but on eternal Truth, conforming to traditional models of spiritual devotion. Apart from two instances of merely human learning,13 the “truth-language”14 (a foreign-sounding mystery-language) of Jerome’s Vulgate Bible,15 and not the humanist’s Greek or Hebrew text, is quoted 68 times. Most of the time, Fisher limits himself to a line, a phrase, or even a word, usually from the Prophets, Gospels, and Epistles of St. Paul, although he does range in his sermon from Genesis to Job to the Psalms and Book of Wisdom, and even to the Apocalypse of St. John the Divine. In this respect, Bishop Fisher’s “mincing of the bible” is essential to his homily, much as it is to the liturgy, where the Christian appropriation of the Hebrew Bible has always worked by a “flicking back and forth between the Jewish scriptures, the Gospels, and the Epistles (i.e., on the technology that Christianity had used and refined from the second century C.E.)”16 As Peter Stallybrass perceptively remarks, “discontinuous reading” which “the codex enabled” has always been “central to Christianity” (47), since the coherence of a hybrid text of Judaic, Greek, and Roman origins is only achievable in terms of correspondences (both typological and prophetic) between the “Old” and “New” Testaments. Whatever continuity that Christian worship had enjoyed in practice has been, for more than a millennium, “provided above all by the liturgical year” (47). In fact, the liturgy and the rites that flow from it have always depended on widely separated texts to authorize its seasonal thematics. Bishop Fisher is then a typical Catholic reader in mincing the Latin Vulgate text as he does. And he is a good shepherd, endeavouring to translate each of his proof texts, written in the language of mystery 77 (Latin), into the “common” (oral, but certainly not written) language, so that his Englishspeaking flock will not go unfed. Citing a single Church Father (Chrysostom), and quoting him but once, Fisher grants no further space to the supreme doctor of the Church, St. Thomas Aquinas. By contrast, the mystic St. Bernard of Clairvaux17 is quoted thrice, one of these passages an eight-line block of Latin, in his extended meditation on the marvellous “booke of the Crucyfixe.” Indeed, this quotation is nearly twice the length of the next longest citation from John’s first Epistle. Of course, it is absolutely fitting to quote the mystic St. Bernard in the course of a meditation on the Cross, where the saint, in translation, remarks of the crucified Christ, “Who may not bee rauished to hope and confidence, if he consider the order of his body, his head bowing downe to offer a kisse, hys armes spreade to embrace vs, hys handes bored thorow to make lyberall giftes, his side opened to shewe vnto vs the loue of his harte, his feete fastened with nayles, that hee shall not starte away but abyde with vs. And all his bodie stretched, forcesing [sic] him selfe to giue it wholly vnto vs” (411). The passage is powerfully evocative of human flesh in its death agony, even more so since it manifests the Divine love in the supreme act of sacrifice. The bishop’s preferred model for imagining the “Crucyfixe” throughout his sermon, however, is the “holie Sainct Fraunces,” who “so profited in this lesson” of the Cross—i.e., his own extended meditation on the “booke of the Crucyfixe”—“that it caused in hys hearte such a feruent loue, such a deuotion, such an affection to Christ, that the capitall woundes which he beheld in the handes and feete, and syde of Christ, ware by myracle imprinted in hys owne handes and feete” (391). By inciting a similar rapt devotion in his auditors to transcendent “wonders” by which to “feel” the suffering of Christ until the “woundes” in his flesh mysteriously become their own wounds, the bishop aurally prepares them to receive orally the 78 Body of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament. The animating purpose of this homily, it turns out, is the ritual use of speech (sermo) to arrive at the eternal truth of the Word (verbum) made flesh. Style and matter, form and function, are thus perfectly united in the mystery of the Incarnation. On a thematic level, howver, the words with which the sermon had begun—“that thys booke was in my mouth as sweete as honye” (388)—come to mean something radically different from the meaning of the Hebrew prophet, or what his words signified within his own culture. For the bishop has by now turned the “book” into something other than itself, making “thys booke … as sweete as honye” more of a metonymy (this is put for that, e.g., the sacrifice of the Mass put for the blood ties of clansmen)18 for the stigmata imprinted on the flesh of St Francis. And this outcome is reached by means of the bishop having passed “hys time with this booke of the Crucyfixe,” rather than the Book of the Hebrew prophet Ezekiel. Bishop Fisher has by now exposed his “marvellous” way of transcending the Word as text: translate it into the Word made suffering flesh. A particular cultural meaning is thus translated into a cultural meaning quite alien to it. Fisher’s connection to this trope of suffering flesh and its fraught relationship to Johannine doctrine is not always mystical, however, or even theological, but terrifyingly literal. In his administrative capacity as episkopos, overseer of the diocese of Rochester, Fisher was responsible for defending the purity of the Church’s doctrines, and of rooting out any sign of heresy as quickly as possible. Only a year or two before the preaching of this homily, he had been asked by William Warham,19 Archbishop of Canterbury to take over where the archbishop had failed in the heresy examination of one Thomas Hitton. The supposed heretic was an ordained priest who had been apprehended with two copies of an English New Testament in his possession. Hitton was suspected of being an agent, and perhaps a close associate, of William 79 Tyndale who was now living in exile, and had recently published in the Low Countries his own translation of the New Testament in early modern English. Because of people like Thomas Hitton, the Tyndale translation had already begun to make serious inroads into the Church’s control over Kent and other nearby Counties, by challenging the mystery-inducing “truthlanguage” of the Latin Vulgate and promoting the purer sense of the original Greek in English translation. The story of Hitton’s martyrdom in 1529 is not told until the fourth edition of The Actes and Monuments (1583), the final edition published in Foxe’s lifetime. Here, one finds details of Hitton’s examination for heresy in each of his five appearances before Warham. The archbishop is clearly frustrated by this obstinate heretic, deciding, after the fifth examination, to hand him over to Bishop Fisher for recantation or sentencing. Hitton has not only repeatedly denied but refused to recant his denial of “the authoritie of the bishop of Rome,” referring scandalously to “the religion then vsed” as a superstitious and “most abhominable idolatry, and contrary to the holy word of God. And as for the Pope (quoth he) he is Antichrist, the first borne of Sathan, and hath no more power or authoritie, then any other bishop hath in his owne diocesse, nor so much neither.”20 But, because the renegade priest refused to swear an oath affirming these heretical beliefs, it was difficult to charge him. Hitton steadfastly held to his conviction that it was “against Gods lawes and good conscience for any man to sweare to shed hys owne bloud, for so he should be a murtherer of hymselfe, and become guiltie of his owne death.” On his fourth appearance, he dared tell Warham to his face “that the Masse and all popish religion, is nothing els but Idolatry, lies, and open blasphemy against the maiestie of God and his word, and contrary to Gods word in euery respect.” At this, the Archbishop, and “all the Bench was greatly offended, & commaunded him to prison agayne” (TAMO, 2160). After a fifth and futile attempt 80 to get Hitton to swear to his beliefs on examination and, “After all maner of wayes and meanes attempted to drawe this poore man from Christ and his truth, the bishop seeyng that hee could not preuayle, determined to send hym to the bishop of Rochester.” At this point, the questionand-answer format of the “interrogatory” breaks off. Wherever this happens, it seems that the see of Rochester had either lost, or else had destroyed any record by which to vindicate, or else to judge the inquisitor, since Foxe and his document hunters invariably published whatever historical evidence they could find. The little that Foxe can relate of the sequel is told in six lines. We learn that the Archbishop of Canterbury, “consulting with the B. of Rochester and other [sic], proceeded to his condemnation, reading the bloudy sentence of death agaynst him, and so was he beying condemned, deliuered to the secular power, who carried hym to the prison, and soone after he was burned for the testimonie of Iesus Christ” (TAMO, 2160). Here, however, Foxe does not leave the reader to imagine the execution scene but refers by page number to the woodcut portraying Hitton’s fiery death, “for whose constancie in the truth, the euerlasting God be praysed. Amen” (2160). Within the frame of this rather bare scene—bare of prosecuting witnesses or sympathetic members of the community, as is usually the case in John Day’s woodcuts—Hitton stands completely and utterly alone in the devouring flames wreathed about him, rather like the “cloven tongues like as of fire” (Acts 2.3) that descended at Pentecost to the assembled apostles of the resurrected Christ. Whether or not the Bishop of Rochester was present at Maidstone in February 1530 to witness the burning of the first martyr of the English Reformation since the Middle Ages, he could not have been unaware of the suffering of this man whose flesh was burnt to ash in a deadly contest of authority over who had the right to read the Word of God in what language, or even to judge whether a “Book” was a book at all. But neither 81 he nor anyone else could yet foresee how many others were willing to die in coming generations for the Real Presence that they insisted was in the English Word rather than in the Latin Mass. This scene, so familiar to readers of Foxe’s fourth edition in 1583, was to play out almost simultaneously in the family of the future poet John Milton, if less dramatically and without fatal consequence. It was none the less a defining moment in the life of John Milton Sr., since the story was handed down in family lore, how the poet’s “father was brought-up in the Univ of Oxon,” but was “disinherited” by “his gr.father … because he kept not the Catholique Religion.” The biographer had to find space between his lines for an answer to his implied question: “Q. he found a Bible in English in his chamber.” Milton’s own father had been a youthful victim of the Church’s ban on “common books,” or humanist translations of the Bible, and for it was dispossessed of his inheritance by his Catholic father, “so that [sic] thereupon he came to London and became a Scrivener.” The words are those of the antiquarian John Aubrey, carefully collected in his “Minutes of the Life of Mr John Milton,”21 and based on first-hand recollections of the poet’s family and friends—sometimes even filling in the blanks to Aubrey’s questions— after the great man’s death in 1674. In the beginning, it turns out, was the Word, and a rapt reading of it had become the basis of the family mythology. Or more precisely, the humanist’s word sermo had latterly become the ground of the poet’s family history. The Sceptical Humanism of Valla and Erasmus By now it will be clear that Luther’s sola scriptura, or a culture solely of Bible reading, had not yet escaped the shadow of the “Cathedral right next door” (chapter 2). For Luther, as we have seen, never fully escaped the emotional pull of the rite. The Reformation might well have 82 ended in less sweeping reforms and less bitter division than it did, save for one thing: the idea of sola scriptura fell short of making the Bible the only book worth reading. Throughout the century before Luther, the Church’s monopoly of knowledge22 was already challenged by humanist readers who remained good Catholics. The hold of Dominicans over university faculties of theology and philosophy might be one thing; the hold over humane learning in the new medium of print was quite another. The Church’s version of human—meaning Christian—history was the first subject to find its match in the love poet Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374). A native of Tuscany, Petrarch grew up at the papal court at Avignon, where his father was a lawyer. Refusing to follow the law himself, Petrarch began to write his sonnets and travel around the south of France and down the Italian boot to Naples, hunting for little-known classical manuscripts in remote monasteries and abbeys. Learning the lessons taught by Livy on Roman history, he began to discern a “dark age” standing between the high civilization of Greece and Rome and his own era. In the process, he invented a new category of time. As Charles Nauert sees it, “Petrarch’s invention was the concept of historical discontinuity” (19), dividing time into discrete eras, each of which was distinguished by unique features and procedures.23 And it was very clear to Petrarch that his own age did not share the humane values and procedures of ancient Rome. Humanists who followed him also questioned the philosophical and theological methods of the Domincans, an Order founded in 1216, since their “scholastic method of intellectual discourse” at the universities worked by denominating “an authoritative writer” whose work could be “dissolved into a bundle of individual statements; and each statement tended to be quoted and understood without the slightest attention to the context in which it had originally stood, still less with any attention to the historical circumstances or the original intention of the 83 author” (Nauert, 18, 17). The Scholastic method was broadly based on a “closed world of foregone conclusions” as compared to “open-ended research.”24 Later, Erasmus would write satirically in The Praise of Folly (1511) that this method favoured esoteric, “eternal” truths of Scholastic logic, even though the “subtle refinements of subtleties,” as its eponymous heroine confessed, “are made still more subtle by all the different lines of scholastic argument, so that you’d extricate yourself faster from a labyrinth than from the tortuous obscurities of realists, nominalists, Thomists, Albertists, Ockhamists, and Scotists—and I’ve not mentioned all the sects, only the main ones.”25 If Scholastic knowledge was “eternal,” Folly seemed to say, it was only so in the eternal wrangling of the schools. The Italian humanist Lorenzo Valla (1406-1457), who pioneered a critical turn to the philological methods of the ancients,26 was more cutting still in his critique (ca. 1439) of the Scholastics’ “blind trust in Aristotle’s words,” given that they literally failed to understand “the correct meaning of terms,” as Valla pointed out from the “usage of speakers,” as well as more general “arguments from common sense.”27 He dismissed a wide array of “scholastic terms such as entitas (‘entity’), hecceitas (‘this-ness’) and quidditas (quiddity) for grammatical reasons: these terms do not conform to the rules of word formation in Latin.”28 He did not object to “the introduction of new words for things unknown in antiquity (e.g., bombarda for ‘cannonball’),” but “the terminology coined by the scholastics” signified little more than an imaginary reality, since “nothing exists apart from concrete things.” In his De elegantiae linguae Latinae (ms. 1441; print 1471), Valla further showed how precise command of the grammar and subtleties of classical Latin was essential to understanding a text from Roman antiquity. In a demy-octavo edition of 522 pages, printed a century after his death, he was still supplying readers with a “manual for the correct use of Latin syntax and vocabulary” (Stanford), as well as a very 84 accessible primer for the employment of some two thousand indexed words, grammatical cases, and phrases on a wide variety of topics.29 These included the proper use of comparatives and superlatives, proper names and diminutives, and complex constructions from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Virgil’s Aeneid, together with locutions from Cicero that were often misused or misconstrued by the medieval litterati.30 In the decade preceding his death in 1457, Valla completed the massive project he had begun in the early 1440s of systematically comparing the Latin Vulgate with the Greek New Testament, the first work of its kind in over a millenium.31 In Annotations on the New Testament he “observed serious stylistic defects in the currently used Bible, and sought to remedy these defects by referring to the Greek original” (Nauert 42). But Valla’s return to the Greek text as his authority also raised “troubling questions” about Church doctrine, such as Jerome’s stunning mistranslation of the Greek word metanoia (a change of mind, repentance) as paenitentia (penance). Valla’s recovery of the correct sense of metanoia quickly helped to undermine the authority of a thousand-year-old Latin text, as well as the typcially Scholastic arguments32 based on it, by laying bare an embarassingly mistaken transmission of a term from Mark’s Gospel that, time out of mind, had afforded apostolic authority for Church doctrine and discipline.33 As early as 1440, Valla had begun to show how mistranslation and miscopying were not the least of the several types of textual corruption. The 4th-century Donation of Constantine—the parting “gift” of an emperor pulling up stakes for Constantinople and assigning political authority to the Pope over the Western Roman Empire, although the deed wasn’t even “found” until the 8th century—was politically corrupt, an utter forgery that, among other misprisions, employed the medieval word banna for flag instead of the classical Latin word vexillum (Nauert 41). The use of such distinctly medieval terms in a “classical” text introduced a new concept of 85 anachronism to historical discourse, an idea that was totally foreign to the medieval mind.34 Latin was Latin, eternal and unchanging. But Valla was now able to prove the fact of linguistic evolution over many centuries,35 a revolutionary idea that would become the basis of modern linguistics, much as Petrarch’s “invention” of historical discontinuity remains the ground of critical history today. Valla’s attention to the provenance of documents, the “elegance” or inelegance of Latin usage, and the “social embeddedness”36 of texts did as much as later controversies about the sacraments would do to break a clerical monopoly on knowledge. Valla even proved that the ancient writings of “Dionysius the Areopagite,” such as On the Celestial Hierarchy and On the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy,37 were not the work of St. Paul’s convert Dionysius, briefly mentioned in Acts chapter 17, but blatant forgeries of a 6th-century Christian NeoPlatonist who supposedly was born five hundred years before his time. As James Turner remarks, Valla “showed that a legal council, not philosophical academy, sat on the Areopagus, making Paul’s Dionysius closer to jurist than philosopher. Valla went on: Neoplatonism hardly existed in Paul’s day; a firstcentury date created historical absurdities in ‘Dionysius’s’ writings; no one before Pope Gregory the Great (590-604) mentioned the book” (36). Humanist reading of all kinds of texts that had long been authoritative in the Western Church began to expose the moral rot at its foundation. Valla’s philology set the stage after his death for more risky philological scrutiny of the Bible. Given the new findings of Erasmus in Greek, and Reuchlin in Hebrew, about holy writ, no matter what a “priest might claim” about “the sacred office of mediating between God and man,” most “editors and publishers” found themselves in “agreement with Roger Bacon and Lorenzo Valla” about scriptural exegesis: “They felt that Greek and Hebrew scholars were better equipped for the task,”38 since they alone had grasped the historical meaning of scripture for 86 those who wrote (and read) the Hebrew and Greek texts. That is not to say that Valla or Petrarch or any of the other humanists were irreligious enemies of the Church; rather, they relentlessly contended against uncritical Scholastic traditions and opened a way towards historically verifiable “truth.” In fact, when Erasmus happened upon a copy of Valla’s Annotations of the New Testament in 1504 in “the Norbertine Abbey library of Parc, near Louvain,”39 he found more than “a collection of critical notes on the text of the Gospels, the Epistles and Revelation.” He also hit upon a sceptical method of textual analysis that would lead him to conclude that “the last twelve versus [sic] of Mark’s Gospel” were an unauthorized addition, written long after the fact, as were “the verses in John VII, 53 to VIII, 11” (Huizinga, 92). The trademark humanist motto, “back to the sources,” by which Erasmus aimed to purify the Church as well as its Christian Truth, now exposed the “truth” of tradition to controversy, calumny, and outright mockery. It was in this context that Bishop Fisher’s sermon could be said to take on the character of an aggressive defense of tradition, as much as it was spiritual preparation for public reception of the Sacrament. Fifteen years before his old friend Fisher was to preach that sermon in 1530 or 1531, Erasmus had already anticipated the great controversy his work was about to generate by writing a dedicatory letter to William Warham, Archbishop of Canterbury, published in the preface to his nine-volume edition (1516) of the writings of Jerome, where he assured his former patron that his sole purpose in the Greek Testament was to rescue the Vulgate from the errors of tradition and “the ravages of time.”40 Some years later, close to the date of Fisher’s sermon, Erasmus wrote to another English cleric, his former student Robert Aldrich, Bishop of Carlisle, to defend himself against mendicant preachers at St. Paul’s Cross in London who had accused him of 87 “impiety and falsehood” for spurning the Vulgate equivalent of the word “given” in John 7, “For the Spirit had not yet been given.” But that word, Erasmus insisted, did not appear in any manuscript in Greek; so, the dogmatic reading, “For the Spirit had not yet been given, because Jesus had not yet been glorified,” was itself misleading. “I have translated,” Erasmus insisted, “what the Greek text, omitting the participle, has: ‘For there was not yet the Holy Spirit because Jesus had not yet been glorified.’ By doing so, he says, I have exposed the Catholic faith to the utmost peril, encouraging everyone to believe once again that the Spirit is a creature who did not exist from eternity but began to exist in time.”41 “Gifted like Valla with a keen critical sense,” Charles Nauert remarks, “Erasmus realized that even in the case of a sacred text, a skilled grammarian’s judgment on the original words must take priority over any theologian’s interpretation of any passage” (160). Indeed, Erasmus “realized more than any of his humanist predecessors,” including Valla, “that in order not only to correct textual errors but also to get more directly at the meaning intended by the biblical author, scholars must apply to Scripture the same critical approach that had already proved fruitful in the restoration and interpretation of the secular texts of ancient literature.” The humanist’s faith in the historical text—read in its original language and sense, as well as in its original social context with a sharp eye to its historical difference—was his only purpose in correcting so many errors of the Vulgate translation. To Aldrich, his former pupil, Erasmus further insisted that those who reviled even the title of his New Testament, Novum instrumentum (1516), were just as ignorant of the Church Fathers as they now revealed themselves to be of the original scriptures: “They are not aware that St Jerome uses this term several times, nor do they seem to have read Augustine, who teaches that it is more appropriate to say ‘Instrument’ than ‘Testament.’”42 Indeed, all the “tablets and parchments on which compacts are written,” he explained, “are called 88 instruments.” But then such grammatical illiteracy had also produced a falsified version of some of the central beliefs of the Christian religion. Erasmus came under further fire from Scholastics as well as other traditionalists for his omission “from both the Greek and Latin texts of the first two editions of his Greek New Testament” of the “comma Johanneum (I John 5-7) [sic], the passage that theologians long had used as the most explicit scriptural proof of the doctrine of the Trinity.”43 Erasmus denied expressing doubt of orthodox theology or any heretical doctrine by his omission, appealing rather to the firm principle of historical priority, in which the oldest texts have the greatest authority. Not one of his Greek source texts had contained this dubious assertion of the Vulgate, “For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one” (I John 5.7-8). In effect, Erasmian method had exposed the doctrine as a scribal interpolation or, more bluntly, a doctrinal forgery that had been added to the Greek text where it did not appear.44 “Accused of Arianism for having suppressed a Trinitarian formula, he promised to reproduce it if anyone showed him an ancient manuscript which gave it” (Halkin, 105). Neither Erasmus nor his critics were mistaken about the result; anti-Trinitarianism became far more common over the next two centuries. While Trinitarians could still rely on the authority of tradition or Church Councils, they could no longer claim the authority of Holy Scripture for their doctrine. Only the Greek or Hebrew scriptures conferred such textual authority for would-be editors in the philological tradition of Erasmus. But that authority could only be gained by observing two key principles45 which Erasmus applied to printed scriptures: “that the same philological rules apply to the Bible as to other ancient texts and that a text in its original language overrules any translation.”46 89 As early as 1498, Aldus Manutius, the Venetian publisher of classical Greek texts, had already begun looking to the authority of the original language of the Old Testament in an unsuccesful attempt to procure Hebrew types for a trilingual Bible.47 Ten years later, Erasmus would spend eight productive months in the Venetian printshop of Manutius with a stellar humanist team of Greek and Latin experts preparing an expanded second edition of the Adages.48 “When in September 1508, the edition of the Adagia was ready, Aldus wanted Erasmus to remain to write more for him. Till December he continued to work at Venice on editions of Plautus, Terence, and Seneca’s tragedies” (Huizinga, 65). Erasmus, in turn, was so impressed by the scholarship of the Aldine editions that, ever after, he would be unstinting in his praise of Manutius who had brought the heritage of ancient Greece to cities north of the Alps where it now circulated as freely as it had been doing in Italy for several decades before the fall of Constantinople in 1453. “Aldus, he wrote, had taken up the task which had in other ages been undertaken by great rulers, such as the legendary founder of the Alexandrian library. But whereas the library of Ptolemy ‘was contained between the narrow walls of its own house’ the printer was ‘building up a library which has no other limits than the world itself.’”49 Manutius died in 1515, a year after Erasmus had travelled up the Rhine to Basel to prepare his bilingual edition of the first New Testament printed in Greek, his Novum intrumentum (1516). En route, the “German humanists hailed him as the light of the world—in letters, receptions and banquets” (Huizinga, 89). Although his new publisher was the renowned humanist scholar-printer Johann Froben, Erasmus never lost sight of his formative experience in an immense “library without walls,” the revivifying cultural goal of the Aldine editions. The “Sacrament” of Reading in Paraclesis 90 As the illegitimate sons of a Dutch priest, Erasmus and his brother Peter had been sent to a school established by the Brethren of the Common Life at Deventer nearly a century earlier. The school at this time was directed by one of the great educational reformers of the age, Alexander Hegius (d. 1498). Before he was eclipsed by his student Erasmus, Hegius was even regarded as one of the foremost Dutch humanists, being the first in Europe to teach Greek in a public setting outside of a university. Erasmus’ early training in Greek and classical literature likely predisposed him to read texts in their original language, as well as to understand their historical and social contexts.50 All of this underwrites his oft-repeated maxim, “back to the sources!” For the “sources” invariably remind us of our need to understand the world in which that “literature” originated. But the “source” for the humanist was also a potential source, in the present, of renewal, or rebirth. Particularly in “A Paraclesis to the Pious Reader,” Erasmus cautioned readers of his first edition of Novum instrumentum (1516) that, “I disagree entirely with those who do not want divine literature to be translated into the vernacular tongues and read by ordinary people, as if Christ taught such convoluted doctrine that it could be understood only by a handful of theologians, and then with difficulty.”51 Truth was meant to be understood by all. Sidestepping institutional mysteries, the Paraclesis was a cheerful polemic against a theological monopoly on sacred truth, and a hopeful defense of ordinary people’s ability to understand Truth on its own terms. As Erasmus expressed it, “Christ desires his mysteries to be known as widely as possible,” and therefore longs to see “these books … translated into every tongue of every land so that not only the Scots and the Irish but Turks and Saracens too could read and get to know them” (411). Nor is his global vision limited to local hierarchies with material wealth and power but includes the spiritual enrichment of ordinary women and men of 91 every nation, and of every type of labourer, not just the universal scholar: “I would like every woman to read the Gospel, to read the Epistles of Paul. … How I wish that the farmer at his plough would chant some passage from these books, that the weaver at his shuttles would sing something from them, that the traveller would relieve the tedium of his journey with stories of this kind.” In the most inclusive way possible, Erasmus aimed to fill the world with eager readers who would encounter “Truth” in the common language of human life and everyday experience,52 as well as those who were able to read the ancient languages of his edition. The truth of Christianity would then become an inward, lived truth, as well as that other, more public truth performed in the rituals of the Church. As cultural anthropologist Joseph Henrich suggests, however, the appeal to a broader readership also highlighted psychological distinctions between readers whose inward, lived truth was based on their reading of Scripture, and those whose religion was formal and external, or something performed in public. “Fancy rituals, immense cathedrals, big sacrifices, and ordained priests,” as Henrich puts it, “typically play[ed] little role”53 in the development of what was still an emerging psychology of Protestant believers. What he describes as a “proto-WEIRD psychology in medieval and Early Modern Europe” was also conditioned, however, by the suppression of kin-based institutions and the rise of nuclear families with social tendencies toward individualism, independence, and voluntary association among like-minded individuals (396). “To better navigate a world of individuals without dense social interconnections,” such persons “increasingly thought about the world more analytically and less holitistically/relationally” (396-7). And “As the key substrates of social life shifted from relationships to individuals, thinkers increasingly highlighted the relevance of individual’s internal attributes” (397). At the same time, the rise of literacy and Scripture translations 92 provided by Luther and Erasmus served as catalysts which preciptiated this new sense of inwardeness. As Erasmus editor Robert Sider points out, a similar sense of inwardness was already familiar to humanists from their reading of the Greek and Latin poets, among others. To humanists, there was a remarkable “intimacy” in the writings of antiquity that “brought its authors into the presence of the reader, their narratives providing a record of life that seemed capable of reaching across the ages to be absorbed by those who lived more than a millennium later.”54 There is evidence, however, that this “inwardness” of reading had already been recognized in antiquity by some of the Church Fathers. In “The Silent Voice,” a section of his chapter “How We Read,” the French neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene recalls the surprise of Augustine, described in his Confessions (ca. 400 CE), on visiting Ambrose and finding him reading his book in silence. Evidently the experience was unique in the 4th century, even among Church Fathers, given that the cramped handwriting on the page of illuminated manuscripts made it difficult to read without sounding out every word concealed in the unbroken line of text. But, as Augustine instantly recognized, it was Ambrose’s “heart [that] sought out the meaning.” A parallel observation comes from the 7th-century theologian Isidore of Seville, who “marvelled that ‘letters have the power to convey to us silently the sayings of those who are absent.’”55 In both instances, we encounter the power of silence to speak directly to the understanding of the “auditor,” rather than to the sense of hearing. For the 16th-century Erasmus, the reader able to hear the “silent voice” of the divine Word on a printed page thus seems to experience exactly what Augustine had recognized in the silent reading of Ambrose—the words of “divine literature” speaking directly to the heart, not as theologians or even homilists spoke, to the ear. 93 Renaissance literary scholar Yaakov Mascetti describes the humanist’s “hearing” in similar terms, arguing that Erasmus displaced “textual meaning from the words on the page to the reader’s conscience, making the reader’s heart (pectus) into the ‘library of Christ himself’ (Ratio verae theologiae).”56 By “engaging the text” of scriptures “under the Holy Ghost’s enlightening guidance while surrendering cognition to the text’s self-referential nature, and absorbing it by means of repeated readings and through its memorization,” the reader was now engaged in “a process of naturalization,” or full immersion “in the biblical text (in naturam ibit), to be transformed himself into a living image of the Scripture.”57 Here is reliable evidence of a major cultural shift taking place in early modern culture, what the anthropologist Joseph Henrich rightly describes as a primary concern with “people’s internal states, beliefs, feelings, and dispositions” (420). But “internal states” and “dispositions” also fall short of something else that Erasmus has identified. By encountering the living Christ on the page and internalizing his speech (sermo), the reader arrives at a new understanding of “spirit,”58 as Erasmus expresses it, or mind as we might say, using the French word esprit. In such writings, the speech of the book evidently comes to life in the reader’s mind, the “spirit” of the author “absorbed” by the reader’s “spirit.” Or, as the neuroscientist Dehaenethe puts it more poetically, what reading had literally enabled “was a new and almost magical ability—the capacity to ‘listen to the dead with our eyes’” (302).59 According to the gospels, Christ had after his death appeared in person to his disciples who saw him with their own eyes. But when the gospels tell later generations, “He is risen,” that other sense of listening “with our eyes” becomes an intimate encounter with his presence manifested in the printed Word. “Is he a theologian let alone a Christian,” Erasmus asks, “who has not read the literature of Christ? ‘He who loves me,’ he said, ‘keeps my words’” (Sider, 414). 94 And if “keep[ing] my words” means learning “the divine books word for word,” as Erasmus advises in the Ratio verae theologiae, until you “make your own breast [or heart] a library of Christ,”60 it then involves more than a moral or ritual observance. It means becoming a fleshand-blood version of that book which contains his words. The flesh made Word, as it were. What had troubled many Catholics about Erasmus’ Enchiridion militis christiani, or Handbook of the Christian Soldier (1503) more than a decade earlier had been its pronounced “emphasis on individual experience and its neglect of the external forms of Catholic piety” (Nauert 159). Deliberately or not, the humanist privileging of individual experience posed a serious challenge to the public nature of Christian worship as a “true” expression of faith. And the enthusiasm which Erasmus later expressed in the Paraclesis for Everyman or Everywoman to read the gospels as a private and inward expression of deep religious feeling was more dangerous still, since it put even greater emphasis on the importance of mental states, and inward disposition, as the highest form of religious experience. Indeed, it hinted at the heterodox notion that the Word encountered by readers at first-hand could find a literal embodiment in their own inwardness of reading. The flesh could be made Word in each, and every reader. What startles in this formulation is not the resuscitation of the dead letter by a reader lending it new life; rather, the letter itself is alive, is pure Spirit, is quite as present here and now in the printed Word as it was when the Word was first made Flesh. In truth, it is “Christ himself,” Erasmus writes in his original preface to Novum instrumentum, “who in these books especially fulfils what he promised, that he would be with us always, ‘even unto the end of the world’; for in them he lives even now, breathes and speaks to us, I might almost say more effectively than when he lived among men” (Sider, New Testament, 417). It is an extraordinary claim, insofar as “these books show you the living image of his holy mind and Christ himself, speaking, healing, 95 dying rising to life again. In short, they restore Christ to us so completely and so vividly that you would see him less clearly should you behold him standing before your very eyes” (422). Compared with Bishop Fisher’s version of “the booke of the Crucyfixe,”—a book without speech in the form of the eternal Word (logos)—this sounds more like an intimate conversation (sermo) between the reader and the living Word. In effect, it is an expression, realized in highly dramatic form, of the difference between verbum and sermo in Erasmus’ revision of Jerome’s In principio erat verbum. For Erasmus abandons the mystery and power of the Eternal Word for the contingent, egalitarian reciprocity of speech. It is as if Christ were addressing us here and now, his “spirit” or mind speaking directly to the “heart,” as Erasmus phrases it. The Word became flesh so that the flesh could become Word. It was one thing to want, as Erasmus did, to restore Christianity to its source, much as he had brought the culture and literature of classical Antiquity to his present age. It was another thing entirely to insist that the reading of the gospels in their original language—and if in Latin translation, then why not in vernacular translation—could create the “Real Presence” of Christ here and now. At least that is what editor Robert Sider hints at in his latest introduction to “The Philosophy of Christ” in Paraclesis: “it is because Christ is in the pages of the Bible” that “we meet him there as a living person. As we read those pages we absorb his presence, we become one with him.”61 To become one with him is the purpose of the sacrament. And Erasmus’ own evocative phrase—that “he lives even now, speaks and breathes to us”—furthers this notion that “we become one with him.” For Erasmus envisions Christ as being present and speaking directly to the reader from the page, although neither he nor his editor explicitly equates this notion of verbal “presence” to a reader with the experience of a communicant of “the Real Presence” in the 96 Mass. The humanist comes, almost by accident, to this novel way of communing with the Son of God, of becoming “one with him” through a type of sacramental reading. What is equally telling is how little Erasmus conceives of reading, as Bishop Fisher did, as a “mincing” together, or collating, of the Old and New Testaments. Contrary to the practice of “discontinuous reading” in the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas, or even in the liturgy, Erasmus’ reading practice in the Paraclesis points to the primacy of narrative rather than of doctrine or ritual. And it is equally well suited to the continuous unrolling of papyri, let alone a leather scroll.62 Although Peter Stallybrass claims that, “To imagine continuous reading as the norm in reading a book is radically reactionary; it is to read a codex as if it was a scroll, from beginning to end,”63 Erasmus does see Christ as present, and presently speaking to him in his own continuous reading of the gospels, as if they were unrolling before his very eyes. In such fashion, the Eternal Word (logos) translates himself through speech (sermo) into an ongoing conversation with the reader. Nor is continuous reading of the gospels as a “scroll” at all regressive in the way that Stallybrass suggests. Rather than lament the loss of liturgical organization or a weakening of theological analogies got from a mincing and yoking of widely separated verses from scripture, the humanist reader affirms rather the primacy of narrative and the dramatic speech acts of the Saviour. Almost inadvertently, the humanist scholar and translator has invested the experience of reading the Word with the Real Presence—that doctrine of the Blessed Sacrament whereby the bread is transformed in the sacrifice of the Mass into the Word made flesh, and the ritual completed in the reception of the Body of Christ. Read in this way, the practice of Erasmus could indeed verge on “heresy,” since it no longer requires any priest or altar on which to perform the ritual miracle or to approach its transcendent 97 mystery. Only the book with its silent reader and that inward drama of “keep[ing] my words” are required to create the “real presence.” As James Kearney remarks of this passage, “The Word made flesh is nothing compared with the flesh made word, the incarnate Christ nothing compared to the book that the reader of Erasmus’s Paraclesis holds in hand.”64 But is that what Erasmus had in mind? He had already suggested something of this sort some thirteen years earlier in his “Handbook of the Christian Soldier,” addressed “To a Friend at Court” who had long “entreated” him to set down “a kind of summary guide to living, so that, equipped with it, you might attain to a state of mind worthy of Christ.”65 Here, one is reminded once again of the psychological perspective of Henrich, where “mental states” and “inward” experience have become more important in early modern culture than outward, public acts. As Henrich sums up this idea, “Salvation—a contingent afterlife—is generally achieved based on people’s own internal mental states—their faith. Rituals and good deeds play little or no role. Intentions and beliefs, or what is in a person’s heart, are most important” (415). But the Enchiridion by the Catholic Erasmus is far more faithful to this norm than Luther’s De servo arbitrio (On the Will not Free),66 which effectively denies human agency by diminishing the role of individuals in their own salvation. What helps to clinch this impression is the agency that Erasmus ascribes to individual readers, insisting that, “No one is a Platonist who has not read the books of Plato. Is he a theologian let alone a Christian, who has not read the literature of Christ?”67 Even the words of pagan philosophers who had anticipated the Christian truth are worth “keeping,” much as “He who loves me,” as Erasmus quoted Christ, “keeps my words.” Unabashedly, Erasmus reminds his readers that, “with Divinely inspired knowledge of all these things, Plato wrote in the Timaeus that the children of the gods had fashioned man in their own image a soul composed of two parts, 98 one divine and immortal, and the other mortal and subject to various disorders.”68 Among his cardinal rules for Christian conduct in the Handbook of the Christian Soldier, Erasmus further endorses the Pauline idea, echoing Plato, of the spirit’s need to surmount the flesh.69 He adds only the qualification that you first “establish firmly in your mind that perfect piety in the attempt to progress always from visible things, which are usually imperfect or indifferent, to invisible” (61). It is the doctrine of NeoPlatonic ascent first made fashionable a few decades earlier by followers of Marsilio Ficino and his NeoPlatonist school in late 15th-century Florence. And it accords well with orthodox Christian thought. But is it conceivably more than that? While Erasmus follows the NeoPlatonic ascent from “visible” to “invisible” worlds, he still sees it conventionally as an ascent from pagan to Christian truth, concluding that, “There is hardly a single Epistle in which Paul does not treat of this, does not inculcate in us that we must not put any trust in the flesh, and that in the spirit there is life, liberty, adoption,” since “God is spirit” (Enchiridion, 70). He also explicitly identifies “spirit” with mind when he scolds, “You worship the bones of Paul preserved in a relic casket, but do not worship the mind of Paul hidden away in his writings? You make much of a piece of his body visible through a glass covering, and you do not marvel at the whole mind of Paul shining through his writings?” (72). The “whole mind of Paul” only comes into view “through his writings,” and would perish with him were it not for the medium which preserves his thought—the page of paper that Erasmus has just read. Reading takes the reader from the seen to the hidden world of the “spirit,” to think with another’s mind. The “whole mind” or spirit “of Paul” would also be little more than a human mind preserved on a sheet of paper, were it not for the inspiring Word—now widely dispersed by “God’s gift” of print technology—that preserves and disseminates the products of the Divine mind. For Erasmus, 99 sermo thus moves towards verbum in so far as the printed word becomes ubiquitous even as it preserves the essence of Paul’s mind. This sense of thought as the essence of his being also shines through one letter he wrote in 1518 to a provincial bishop who expressed a desire to meet the great humanist in person (some two years after the publication of Paraclesis): “There is nothing in me worth seeing,” Erasmus replied self-deprecatingly; “and if there were, it is all expressed in my published work. That is the best part of me, and what remains would be dear at a farthing.”70 The written word (sermo) is a distillation of the self that speaks, the essence of his being. Here in embryo is the same idea that John Milton would develop more than a century later in his Areopagitica (1644), that soaring hymn to the book. And, though Milton’s idea resonates in much the same key as it does in Erasmus, it remains a distinctly Miltonic hymn. Expressing with characteristic eloquence a profoundly humanist view of writing, Milton opposes the licensing of books with a similar Erasmian conceit: For Books are not absolutely dead things, but doe contain a potencie of life in them to be as active as that soule was whose progeny they are; nay they do preserve as in a violl the purest efficacie and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. … And yet … unlesse warinesse be us’d, as good almost kill a Man as kill a good Book; who kills a Man kills a reasonable creature, Gods Image; but hee who destroyes a good Booke, kills reason it selfe, kills the Image of God, as it were in the eye. Many a man lives a burden to the Earth; but a good Booke is the pretious life-blood of a master spirit, imbalm’d and treasur’d up on purpose to a life beyond life.71 100 The “Eternal” essence of mind for Milton at this stage is preserved by the medium, much as it was for Erasmus: the writer’s sermo continues to speak in the logos of the book. If books are indeed written for the living, then “that living intellect that bred them” will live on in the writing, long after the death of the body. The book is thus the embodiment of the mind that bred it. Or rather, the distillation of the human mind in book form is the very soul of the humanist enterprise. Milton makes it his first principle in his humanist argument about reading. But in Areopagitica, it has not yet “become one with” Christ. Erasmus had already anticipated such a mode of reading in Enchiridion, not least in his claim for the preservation of mind or spirit in written texts: “As long as the apostles enjoyed the physical company of Christ,” he asks, “do you not read how weak they were and how crass was their understanding? And yet after the … teaching that proceeded from the mouth of God, after so many proofs of his resurrection, did he not upbraid them for their incredulity at the very last hour as he was about to be received into heaven?”72 Here, although Christ is portrayed as sermo, or speech, the humanist’s reading shades toward the 5th-century heresy of Eutyches—who had maintained “an extreme form of monophysitism in which the Lord’s humanity is thought to be totally absorbed into his divinity”73—an heretical “error” that Erasmus seems not to have realized74: “It was the flesh of Christ that stood in the way, and that is what prompted him to say: ‘If I do not go away, the Paraclete [Holy Spirit] will not come. It is expedient for you that I go.’”75 The suffering human flesh of Bishop Fisher’s “booke of the Crucyfixe” begins to look more like an impediment to Erasmus than a means of union with the Son of God. For it is in the written text that the Real Presence becomes more truly present than in the human body of the Incarnate Christ. Its full reception seems to be possible only from the page. Though Erasmus 101 may not hear this heretical implication, the act of reading has become its own sacrament, thereby creating a universal priesthood of readers of the printed Word. Coming more than a decade after Enchiridion (1503), the great peroration to the Paraclesis (1516) enlarges on such possibilities through the act of reading the Word: “Therefore, let us all desire these books eagerly; let us admire them greatly; let us die in them; let us be transformed into them since ‘our preoccupations affect our character.’”76 By desiring, admiring, living and dying into that spirit which continues speaking here and now in the written words of Christ, Erasmus affirms that one may indeed “be transformed into them,” the flesh made Word by that divine Presence contained in the book (although he doesn’t mention its apparent affinity with the Sacrament). Only now, the historical Incarnation of the divine Word (logos) who had appeared in Galilee begins to pale by comparison with the act of reading Christ the Word (sermo) here and now in his own speech, since “these books restore Christ to us so completely and so vividly that you would see him less clearly should you behold him standing before your very eyes” (422). Metaphor and Transformation in the Ratio Erasmus never seems to have realized, or at least acknowledged, how such a view of Christ restored in the minds of readers is essentially sacramental, although his arguments for reading scripture subtly authorize readers to be their own priests. In the colloquy Confabulatio pia (“The Whole Duty of Youth”) first published in 1522, the young boy Gasparus admits to feeling quite let down by the preaching of his priest. So, “he is left to his own wits,” as literary critic Brian Cummings remarks, acknowledging that “he must,” as he says in his own voice, “‘provide myself with a little book containing the Gospel and Epistle for the day, and then I recite or read it 102 myself (aut pronuncio aut oculis lego),’” evidently referring “to silent reading or reading by the book.” But “The whole thing is done so lightly we may not even notice what has happened.” In fact, as Cummings suggests, “Gasparus is reading, thinking, interpreting, and perhaps even believing, for himself. That is why the theologians at Paris are getting so worried.”77 Of course, Erasmus had given them greater reason to worry in the second edition of his revised New Testament of 1519, offering readers specific and effective methods by which to surmount the difficulties of Scripture without the aid of theologians. The work which follows Paraclesis in the 2nd edition of Novum Testamentum, the Ratio verae theologiae (“System of True Theology”), aims to teach aspiring theologians exactly how to do that—to read for themselves what he terms “divine literature,” by following the methods of interpretation proper to all literature, rather than those of “dialectic” or “Scholastic theology.” Indeed, practitioners of the latter “attribute so much to this discipline,” he says, “that they suppose the Christian faith is finished and done for if it is not secured by the support of dialectic, though meanwhile they disdain grammar and rhetoric as utterly superfluous.”78 Of course, there remains the problem of the languages in which Scripture was originally written, and “the fact that certain things, because of idioms peculiar to the languages, cannot even be transferred to a foreign language without losing their original clarity, their native grace, their special nuance” (119). But “Of these languages” even “St. Augustine was genuinely skilled only in Latin, had some small acquaintance with Greek, but neither knew nor hoped to know Hebrew” (118). So, the novice theologian can get by, like him, with printed aids such as dictionaries and grammars of sacred languages. More problematic is the fact that, “Scripture generally speaks indirectly and under the cover of tropes and allegories, and of comparisons or parallels, sometimes to the point of obscurity in a 103 riddle” (197). That is why it is “useful,” and even necessary, “for the young man destined for theology to be carefully practised in the figures and tropes of the grammarians and rhetoricians, which are learned with little effort” (123), particularly with the aid of ancient experts, such as the Roman educator Quintilian (35 CE – ca. 96 CE), whose Institutio Oratoria was the basis of instruction in rhetoric and grammar in almost every Renaissance grammar school in Europe. From Erasmus’ Ratio, the beginner could absorb many of the lessons that he, too, had adapted from Quintilian, or from “the fourth-century grammarian Donatus,” whose exegesis of the Roman comedies of Terence had taught none other than “the Greek Church Father Origen” how to read with equal skill the Scriptures.79 Indeed, Origen had done “for the divine books,” such as the story of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis 22, “exactly what Donatus does for the comedies of Terence in laying bare the intent of the poet. Would anyone see such things who had never applied himself to the more refined literature” (Ratio, 126) of the ancients? Erasmus is none the less keenly “aware with what arrogance some despise poetry as a subject worse than childish, with what arrogance they despise rhetoric and all good literature, as it is called—and is. And yet this literature, however loathsome to them, has given us those distinguished theologians,” many of them Church Fathers like Origen, “whom we are now more inclined to neglect than either to understand or to imitate” (127). But above even these is the prime example of “Christ,” who “clothed almost all his teachings in comparisons; this belongs especially to poets. Augustine did not think it a childish exercise to note the figures of the rhetoricians in the writings of the prophets and the Epistles of Paul.” The truth that the present age has forgotten, Erasmus solemnly advises his readers, is that the liberal arts, and particularly the arts of grammar and rhetoric, form the broadest and most direct avenue leading to the goal of scriptural exegesis. Sacred literature must be read in much the same way as “profane literature.” 104 But what is the purpose and worth of exegesis if the means of “divine” and “profane literature” are so similar? “Let this be your first and only goal,” Erasmus advises the tyro, “this your prayer, attend to this alone, that you be changed, be swept away, be inspired, be transformed into what you are learning” (117). As English and Classics professor Kathy Eden paraphrases this advice, Erasmus aims “to transform his listeners through his readings of sacred scripture.”80 It is the same goal as the one announced in the Paraclesis, that we “all desire these books eagerly” so that we may “be transformed into them.”81 And yet how is this possible in theory let alone in practice? Where does one even start on such an audacious project, much less proceed in such an undertaking by what means? Searching for a key to unlock the “diffuse” structure of the Ratio itself, Kathy Eden takes Erasmus’ “master trope” to be “the comparison. Whatever structure the Ratio has, … it owes to Erasmus’ penchant for comparing this to that” (93). Such a “penchant” recalls “the metaphoric and metonymic poles” of discourse that the structural linguist Roman Jakobson theorizes as a speaker’s verbal proclivity for either “semantic similarity” or “semantic contiguity.” The first inclination is marked by “PARALLELISM between adjacent lines, for example in Biblical poetry,” and the second by a predilection for “contiguous relationships” and “synecdochic details.” Such mental habits can inform entire literary genres: “In Russian lyrical songs, for example, metaphoric constructions predominate, while in the heroic epics the metonymic way is preponderant.” But the “metonymic way” can also result in “inability to use two symbols for the same thing,” and lead, in extreme cases, to “split personality,”82 or dissociative identity disorder. For Eden, Erasmus’ penchant for metaphor and his distaste for Scholastic metonymy appears in three types of comparison (or semantic similarity) that he offers in the Ratio: the comparison of things in similes, metaphors, parables, and allegories of things “found everywhere in the Old 105 and New Testaments” (105), as well as in De copia where he discourses on tropes in secular literature; of “collationes locorum,” or close comparison of passages, which “aid in the explication of passages that are obscure by comparing them with those that are more easily understood”; and of the “collatio studiorum,” or “comparison of the disciplines that establishes the divide between the self-serving, syllogism-wielding debater or dialectician” of the Schools, “and the rhetorically and grammatically trained yet deeply devout exegete” (105). In each case, the usage remains the same, and is consonant with Erasmus’ oft-stated method: “[J]ust as Christ imitated the speech of the prophets, so Paul and the other apostles reflect the speech of Christ, projecting a theme visually, through parables, and, by frequent repetition, fastening it upon the mind” (Ratio, 200). “By the end of the Ratio,” explains Eden, “it is the “sermo Christi” or “speech of Christ” that “Erasmus has followed … in creating his own parable—one that compares sincere discourse to its sophistical counterpart” (105). In fact, it “is the comparison … in all its forms, from the most compressed metaphors to full-fledged fabulae and allegoriae,” that gives Scripture its “vividness or energeia,” almost like a force of nature that “effectively sweeps readers away, transforming them into what they are learning” (Eden, 98), as compared to lifeless scholastic syllogisms.83 For Erasmus, this “speech of Christ” is based on the parable, which is “an expanded metaphor,” much as “the metaphor is a compressed parable.” In his De copia, Erasmus had already defined “allegoria as a metaphora perpetua, a continuous metaphor” (Eden, 96). Here, we need look no farther than Erasmus’ own model in the rhetoric of the Roman Quintilian, who had proclaimed the power of this “most beautiful of tropes” to accomplish the transformation of readers “into what they are learning.” As Brian Cummings paraphrases Quintilian on this point, the name metaphor “is itself a trope, since the Greek word metaphora is in Latin translatio, a 106 carrying away of something from one place to another” (55). Just as every textual translation is a transfer of sense from one language to another, what is transferred or transported “from one place to another” in reading Scripture is the living power of Christ’s mind through his speech to a reader who thereby “absorb[s] his presence” and “become[s] one with him” in the rhetorical process of metaphoric transfer (from Greek metaphora, transfer, carry across). Translatio becomes a transporting of Christ’s mind into the receptive mind of the reader. Christ, in the concluding words of the first gospel, had literally urged his disciples to “transfer” his words, saying, “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations … to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you.” But he had also promised figuratively that “I am with you always, even unto the end of the world” (Matt. 28.19, 20). Given Erasmus’ promise that readers could see and hear Christ speaking from the printed page, it was but another step to absorb the “speech of Christ,” or speak this sermo Christi, until speakers were also “transformed into what they are learning.” But Christ’s promise is now fulfilled in the changed cultural conditions of the printed book, whereby every devoted reader can become that which is read. And if the chief vehicle of Scripture is metaphor, and reading is the motor of this transfer, the reader who is carried over “from one place to another” is like a work translated “from one” idiom into “another.” Creating a semantic parallelism between two idioms, translation appears to be inherently metaphoric for Erasmus, since it transforms one thing into another, without suprressing the first term. His facing columns of Greek and Latin thus serve as both semantic and visual metaphors of this process. Robert Sider offers another helpful context for understanding how Erasmus would want his own works, such as Paraclesis and the Ratio, to be read: “We must not forget that he began his career as a poet and that throughout his life he showed an appreciation for the allegorical—the 107 ‘poetic’—interpretation of Scripture.”84 This is a most productive context for understanding the thought of Erasmus in its implicit relocation of the Real Presence from bread and blood to the printed book. For in the text as it is conceived by the humanist, there is a greater poetic investment in metaphor than in metonymy—in the enabling assumption of metaphor that “This is identical to that,” or “merges with that,” rather than “This is next to,” “this follows that,” as in the homily of John Fisher, or in the metonymic practice of substituting the body of Christ in place of the original bread, or in replacing the blood sacrifice of the Germanic tribes with the sacrifice of the Mass.85 In literary terms, one might say that the theology of the Mass tends toward metonymy, rather than to metaphor, since it leaves behind the substance (bread) on which it is based, in exchange for the Real Presence which transcends the material world. Indeed, the bread is supposedly abolished in the instant of transubstantiation and replaced by that for which it was put. The result is no longer a merger (or incarnation) of two terms in one, as in poetic metaphor, but a metonymic displacement in which the first term (the “body” of the metaphor) is superseded by a second term (the “spirit” of the metaphor). Metonymy thus tends to be artificial (this is put for that), whereas metaphor appears to be more natural (this is also that). Indeed, as linguistic philosopher Hugh Bredin insists, “Metaphor exists only in partnership with the literal: without this it is not a metaphor, but a mistake.”86 Nor will Erasmus allow a reader’s literal identity to be erased in the metaphoric process of transformation. Rather, “becoming one with” the Christ of the gospels means communing with, or entering into, the life of the Word through “keeping [his] words.” By living the sermo Christi, the reader becomes a further incarnation of that which is read—a this which is identical to that—the self simultaneously becoming other to itself in the act of reading—both it-self and not-self.87 The social and cultural impact of this shift from 108 metonymy to metaphor thus repeats and renews the historic impact of the gospels, which were literally the work of humble fishermen, or a tax collector, or common folk who recorded their own encounter with the sermo Christi, and became his word in the process. Historically, this transition from a medieval culture of metonymy to an Eramsian culture of metaphor would be strategically reversed in the next century by a Restoration culture in England that abhorred metaphor as an instrument of nonconformity and liberty of conscience, since it threatened the “settled” state of religion and civil government after 1660, much as Adrian Johns has portrayed that state in The Nature of the Book.88 As Lana Cable further demonstrates, Samuel Parker, the future bishop of Oxford, actively sought in his Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie (1669) to reduce metaphor to a style which was at best naïvely literal and, at worst, fanatical, and therefore a primary index of religious enthusiasm: “It was metaphor that authorized the workings of private conscience, in Parker’s view, metaphor and not doctrine that makes a religious fanatic.”89 However, Cable adds, “As Milton and Parker both knew, what made free use of metaphor a threat to institutional rigidity was metaphor’s subversive capacity for world-making” (255). In historical fact, it was this “world-making” capacity of metaphor—after Christ’s “Real Presence” had shifted to the page, a page printed in English—that helped to create the greatest literary flowering in English history, not least in the four editions of John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments (1563-1583) that would appear during his lifetime. To generations of readers, Foxe’s monumental work presented, as much as it represented, the metaphoric truth of the flesh made Word, of bodies turning into material text. In the Actes and Monuments, Foxe appears to have fully divined this form of sacramental reading that Erasmus inspired but failed to explicate, much less contain, in terms of doctrine. And at least some of Milton’s 17th-century readers ought to 109 have recognized, in the pinnacle scene of Paradise Regain’d, a necessary, because essentially metaphorical, prequel to the 16th-century vision of Foxe, where the enabling pattern of the flesh made Word was first established, though not revealed, as Milton says, until a later age. Milton’s Jesus, in other words, was the prior model for all those martyrs who would “later” step into the Word with him, though not in the gospels but in Foxe’s book of Actes. 1 James Kearney, The Incarnate Text: Imagining the Book in Reformation England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 14-15. 2 Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 86 n15. 3 Johan Huizinga, Erasmus and the Age of Reformation, 1924 (Princeton University Press, 1984), relates that, in 1511, Erasmus dedicated “a translation of Basilius’s Commentaries on Isaiah to John Fisher, the Bishop of Rochester” (80), which could explain his appointment that year by Chancellor Fisher to teach at Cambridge University. 4 Charles G. Nauert, Humanism and the Culture of Renaissance Europe, 2nd. ed. (Cambridge University Press, 2006), 162. 5 Huizinga remarks, however, that, as late as 1523, “John Fisher, the Bishop of Rochester, Erasmus’s great friend and brother-spirit,” still “looked forward” to his friend’s proposed work on “the true instruction of the Christian preacher,” and “urged the author to finish” his manual on “the art of preaching,” which appeared at Basel (1535) in four volumes as Ecclesiastes (182-3). Bishop Fisher was already dead, beheaded in June of that year for refusing to take the Oath of Supremacy of Henry VIII as head of the Church of England. 6 Nauert, 163. 7 This is a significant element of the written word that ought to have been considered by Kearney in The Incarnate Text, given his concern with the material nature of the text. 8 The English Works of John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester. Collected by John E. B. Mayor for the Early English Text Society. Extra Series 27 (London: N. Trübner, 1876), 388. https://books.google.ca Accessed online 29 May 2019. 9 Nicholas M. Hobson et al., “The Psychology of Rituals: An Integrative Review and ProcessBased Frameword,” Personality and Social Psychology Review (2017), 9. https://doi.org/10.1177/10888683177349 Accessed online 21 January 2021. 10 J. L. Austin defines a constative utterance as a “locutionary” statement of fact or description, whereas the “illocutionary” nature of contextual conditions shapes a performative utterance which does perform the action it describes, as when a witness in a judicial proceeding responds to the question, “Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?” with the promise, “I do.” See Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), 144. 11 These seeming “metaphors” of the Word made Flesh are actually metonymies because the speaking voice in Ezekiel’s “book” is “marvelously” replaced by the silent corpse of the 110 crucified Christ in a homily meant to foreshadow the sacerdotal sacrifice of Christ on the altar of the Mass. “This is put for that,” or rather, “this” is put in the place of “that” in the same logical sequence that “the body of Christ” replaces the bread in the pyx. 12 A decade or so later, Fisher’s evident disdain for books in the “common” language, and the danger of letting them be read by unlearned folk, would be formalized in a statute of 1543 by the canon lawyer and Bishop of Winchester, Stephen Gardiner, who “argued the inappropriateness of bible-reading for those of a lower station.” See Sarah Covington, “Foxe’s Villainous Tribunals: Reading the Judicial Examinations in Actes and Monuments.” Acts of Reading: Interpretations, Reading Practices, and the Idea of the Book in John Foxe’s ‘Actes and Monuments.’ Ed. Thomas P. Anderson and Ryan Netzley (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2010), 199. 13 Fisher’s second paragraph refers to the marvels of natural philosophy (388-89), before turning to “the verye Philosophie of Christian people” (399); later on he refers to historians, or “The storyes” that “telleth of Cambises the King of Persia” who deprived a false judge “of hys office” (397). 14 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 14. 15 Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Cambridge University Press, 1979), remarks that “vernacular Bibles were by no means the only bestsellers that were barred to Catholic readers after the Council of Trent” (415) in 1546, after its decision to make it the approved text of the Church. James Kearney, recalling that the Council wanted it “made known which” of the Latin translations of scripture was “to be held as authoritative [authentica]” in 1546, ultimately declared “that this ancient vulgate translation which is recommended by the long use of so many centuries in the church, be regarded as authoritative” (47). 16 Peter Stallybrass, “Books and Scrolls: Navigating the Bible,” Books and Readers in Early Modern England: Material Studies, ed. Jennifer Andersen and Elizabeth Sauer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 50. 17 Nauert, Humanism, remarks that, “Suspicion of reason was an important source of opposition to the growth of early scholasticism in the twelfth century. An example is the hostility of St Bernard of Clairvaux to the founder of the dialectical method in theology, Peter Abelard” (208). Fisher thus seems to be modelling his protest against Scholastic reason on the mystic St Bernard of Clairvaux, rather than on Erasmus, as he did before. 18 See chapter 2: 48-53, 60. 19 Warham, in his capacity as Archbishop of Canterbury, had given Erasmus a prebend in 1512 in “the form of the rectory of Aldington, in Kent,” allowing him, contrary to custom, to continue to reside in Cambridge, “because he, ‘a light of learning in Latin and Greek literature, had, out of love for England, disdained to live in Italy, France, or Germany, in order to pass the rest of his life here, with his friends’” (Huizinga, 81). 20 The Actes and Monuments Online, 1583 Edition, Book 12, 2160. 21 John Aubrey, “Minutes of the Life of Mr John Milton.” The Early Lives of Milton. Edited with Introduction by Helen Darbishire (1932; New York: Barnes and Noble, 1965), 1. 22 See 436n48, “On Reading Darwin.” 23 It is none the less true, as Eisenstein reminds us, “that ‘a total rationalized view’ of antiquity began to appear only after the first century of printing rather than in Petrarch’s lifetime and that the preservative powers of print were a prerequisite for this new view” (Printing Press, 200). 111 24 James Hankins, “Renaissance Humanism and Historiography Today,” Palgrave Advances in Renaissance Historiography,” ed. Jonathan Woolfson (Basingstoke, Hampshire & New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 76. 25 Collected Works of Erasmus, Vol. 27. Ed. A.H.T. Levi (Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 1986), 127. 26 James Turner, Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2014), 8-14, locates the origins of philology in the ancient museon of Ptolemy I in Alexandria (ca. 300 BCE), where the librarian Zenodotus of Ephesus pioneered such practices as alphabetic listing and textual collation, and where his successor Aristarchus of Samothrace (2nd c. BCE) made the author’s linguistic usage (textual context) and social customs and cultural practices (historical context) the basis of all textual emendation and interpretation. It was Valla who can be credited with reviving the contextual philology of Aristarchus, while Angelo Poliziano (1454-1494) revived the practice of textual collation in his editions of Epictetus’ Enchiridion and Catullus’ poetry, and in Latin translations of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey (Turner, 36-37). 27 The judgment is that of Count Terenzio Mamiani della Rovere, author of “one of the first Italian histories of modern philosophy in 1834,” cited by Brian P. Copenhaver (507), “Valla Our Contemporary: Philosophy and Philology.” Accessed online 8 August 2020. Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 66, no. 4, 2005, pp. 507-525. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3654345 28 Lorenzo Valla, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, rev. version 22 May 2017. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/lorenzo-valla/#LifWor Accessed online 8 August 2020. 29 Jorge Ledo, “The Recovery of Freedom of Speech in the Culture of Humanists and the Communicative Origins of the Reformation,” Traditio 74 (2019): 375-422, argues more broadly that Valla’s “work ushered in a new cultural sensibility” by reclaiming contentio (contention) for discourse from “the sins of the tongue,” so differentiating it from “the confrontation of views and intellectual positions” in late medieval scholasticism that “serves no purpose except feeding the pride of the contenders and therefore remains motionless with regard to the final goal of language, that is, the advancement of learning” (395, 397). DOI: 10.1017/tdo.2019.15 Accessed online 15 March 2021. 30 Laurentii Vallae, Elegantarium Latinae Linguae (Apud Seb. Gryphium, 1556). Warburg Institute Library, University of London. Accessed online 10 August 2020. https://warburg.sas.ac.uk/pdf/nah3375b2640013.pdf 31 Price, Johannes Reuchlin, 28. See also The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 32 Joseph Goering, “The Scholastic Turn (1100-1500): Penitential Theology and Law in the Schools,” A New History of Penance, ed. Abigail Firey (Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2008), 219-37. 33 Peter E. Prosser, "Church history's biggest hoax: Renaissance scholarship proved fatal for one of the medieval papacy's favorite claims." Christian History, Nov. 2001, p. 35. 34 Legal historian C. P. Rodgers makes the same point that, in the medieval era, “There was no sense of historical perspective or anachronism, and history was only studied because it was a valuable repository of examples and precedents” (130). See C.P. Rodgers (1985) Humanism, history and the common law, The Journal of Legal History, 6:2, 129-156, DOI: 10.1080/01440368508530834 35 Even Darwin made extensive use of linguistic analogies in On the Origin of Species (1859) to explain his theory of evolution (see my “On Reading Darwin,” 17-19). While the “time revolution inaugurated by Lyell’s Principles of Geology” (17) was Darwin’s direct inspiration, 112 the “time revolution” of Valla’s linguistic change, four centuries in advance of Lyell, underwrote Darwin’s whole idea of “modification with descent” (20). 36 Kearney, 52. 37 A celestial hierarchy, of course, “naturalizes” the power of an ecclesiastical hierarchy. 38 Eisenstein, Printing Press, 320. 39 Léon-E. Halkin, Erasmus: A Critical Biography, trans. John Tonkin (Oxford, UK & Cambridge, USA: Blackwell, 1993), 63. 40 Cited in Kearney, 57. 41 The Correspondence of Erasmus: Letters 1802 to 1925, March-December 1527. Translated by Charles Fantazzi. Annotated by James K. Farge (Toronto, Buffalo, & London: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 252. 42 The Correspondence, 270. 43 Nauert, Humanism, 63. 44 Preservation Smith, Erasmus: A Study of His Life, Ideals, and Place in History (New York: Harper, 1962), flatly states, “The verse is an interpolation, first quoted and perhaps introduced by Priscilian (A. D. 380) as a pious fraud to convince doubters of the doctrine of the Trinity” (1656). 45 These principles did not always survive editorial practice. Lacking the final six verses of the Book of Revelation in the single Greek manuscript in his possession (miniscule 1r), Erasmus (in)famously translated the concluding verses of the Latin Vulgate into Greek and inserted them at the end of his Greek Novum instrumentum. See Jan Krans, “Erasmus and the Text of Revelation 22:19,” A Journal of Biblical Textual Criticism (2011). https://www.reltech.org/TC/v16/Krans2011.pdf Accessed online 3 July 2020. 46 Turner, Philology, 43. 47 Eisenstein, 340. 48 Huizinga reports that the renowned humanist-scholar printer received him so “cordially” that he “procured him board and lodging in the house of his father-in-law, Andrea Asolani” (64). 49 Eisenstein, 219. 50 These two defining principles of “true theology” are stated from the outset of “The Ratio verae theologiae,” Erasmus on Literature, ed. Mark Vessey from the translation of Robert D. Sider (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021). Here, Erasmus insists that “it is in no way possible to understand what is written if you are ignorant of the language in which it is written” (119); and that, “if we will learn from historical literature not only the setting, but also the origin, customs, institutions, culture, and character of the peoples whose history is being narrated or to whom the apostles write, it is remarkable how much more light and, if I may use the expression, life will come to the reading” (121-22). 51 Collected Works of Erasmus. Vol. 41. The New Testament Scholarship of Erasmus: An Introduction with Erasmus’ Prefaces and Ancillary Writings. Ed. Robert D. Sider (Toronto, Buffalo, & London: University of Toronto Press, 2019), 410. 52 James Hankins remarks an earlier vernacularizing impulse, though for a secular purpose, in the Florentine historian Leonardo Bruni’s 15th-century “programme of vernacular translation of his Latin works” as a supplement to “his own vernacular writings in order to spread the ideals of his civic humanism” (83-84). 53 Joseph Henrich, The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020), 415. 113 54 Sider, “Introduction,” Erasmus on the New Testament, ed. Robert D. Sider (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020), 5-6. 55 Stanislas Dehaene, Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read, 2009 (New York: Penguin, 2010), 25. 56 The trope of Erasmus’ reader making his or her heart (pectus) “a library of Christ” appears in the peroration to “The Ratio verae theologiae” (1519), ed. Mark Vessey, 234. 57 Yaakov Mascetti, “The Bible in the Renaissance—Scholarship in the Middle East,” Liber Annus 67 (2017): 219-235. Accessed online (p.5 of 28 pp), 27 March 2021. https://www.academia.edu/36108386/ 58 If any single contemporary theory of reception comes close to a phenomenological explanation of this spirit of “inwardness,” it is the claim of Georges Poulet that reading “is the act in which the subjective principle which I call I, is modified in such a way that I no longer have the right, strictly speaking, to consider it as my I. I am on loan to another, and this other thinks, feels, suffers, and acts within me” (“Phenomenology of Reading,” in Robert Con Davis, ed., Contemporary Literary Criticism: Modernism Through Poststructuralism [New York & London: Longman, 1986], 354). Cf n64 below. 59 Deheane quotes the 16th-century Spanish poet Francisco de Quevedo (325). 60 “The Ratio verae theologiae” (1519), ed. Mark Vessey, 233, 234. 61 Erasmus on the New Testament, ed. Robert D. Sider (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020), 24. Sider’s humanist trope of the “intimacy” of classical authors “reaching across the ages to be absorbed by those who lived more than a millennium later” (6) now morphs into a sacramental trope of readers “absorbing his presence” to become “one with him” (24). 62 Conversely, Thomas Fulton, Historical Milton (2010), points to the influence of Erasmus’ Adages as a “mincing” together of widely separate texts. Fulton is certainly correct in relating the Adages to the “pedagogical traditions” of 17th-century England, particulary in the widespread practice of keeping commonplace books (56-61). Since adages and aphorisms are extractions, they are obviously the very antithesis of continuous reading practices. But this is not the whole of Erasmus’ influence; his Adages are far less representative of his impact on early modern habits and Reformation practices than was his Greek Testament and his implied theory of reading in the Paraclesis. 63 Peter Stallybrass, “Books and Scrolls: Navigating the Bible,” Books and Readers in Early Modern England: Material Studies, ed. Jennifer Andersen and Elizabeth Sauer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 48. 64 Kearney, 56. 65 Collected Works of Erasmus: Spiritualia. Vol. 66. Ed. John W. O’Malley (Toronto, Buffalo & London: University of Toronto Press, 1988), 24. 66 Jorge Ledo makes a strong case for Erasmus’ moral elevation of sermo as a discursive category, “involving, among other things, an explicit opposition to the sin of contentio” and an affirmation of “the social and intellectual values of caritas/amicitia and the quest for sapientia/prudentia through honestas” (392). Erasmus’ sermo thus signifies for Ledo an amicable inward disposition as compared to Luther’s contentious approach to reform. 67 Collected Works of Erasmus. Vol. 41. The New Testament Scholarship of Erasmus, ed. Robert D. Sider, 414. 68 Collected Works of Erasmus: Spiritualia. Vol. 66. Ed. John W. O’Malley (Toronto, Buffalo & London: University of Toronto Press, 1988), 42. 69 See, for example, Romans 7.14-25; 8.4-14. 114 70 The Correspondence of Erasmus, Vol. 5: Letters 595 to 841; 1517 to 1518, trans. by R.A.B. Mynors and D.F.S. Thomason, annotated by Peter G. Bietenholz (Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 1979), 271. 71 Areopagitica, in The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, vol. 2: 1643-48, ed. Ernest Sirluck (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 492-93 (hereafter CPW 2: 492, etc.). 72 Erasmus, Enchiridion, 73. 73 Hugh MacCallum, Milton and the Sons of God: The Divine Image in Milton’s Epic Poetry (Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 1986), 211. 74 Kilian McDonnell, John Calvin, the Church, and the Eucharist (Princeton University Press, 1967), has identified a “Nestorian tendency” in Calvin, contrary to that of Nestor’s harshest opponent Eutyches, “because of his desire to maintain the essential distinction of the two natures” (213) of the Incarnate Son. Calvin, having weighed the opposing errors of Nestorius and Eutyches in The Institutes of the Christian Religion, II.14.4, trans. Henry Beveridge (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2008), concluded that both were “justly condemned,” since it is “not more lawful to confound the two natures of Christ than to divide them” (312). But Calvin, concludes McDonnell, is still closer than he thought to the Nestorian error of separating the two natures. Erasmus, I think, tends in the opposite direction by devaluing the bodily existence of the Son in a Platonizing manner not so different from the theology of the 5th-century Eutyches. 75 Erasmus, Enchiridion, 73. 76 Erasmus, Paraclesis, 422. 77 Brian Cummings, “Erasmus, Sacred Literature, and Literary Theory,” Erasmus on Literature, ed. Mark Vessey (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021), 49-50. 78 “The Ratio verae theologiae,” Erasmus on Literature, ed. Mark Vessey from the translation of Robert D. Sider (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021), 122. 79 Kathy Eden, “The Parable of Sincere and Sophistical Discourse in the Ratio,” in Erasmus on Literature, ed. Vessey, 97. 80 Eden, in Erasmus on Literature, ed. Vessey, 102. 81 Sider, New Testament Scholarship, 422. 82 R. Jakobson, “The Metaphoric and the Metonymic Poles,” in Roman Jakobson and Moris Halle, Fundamentals of Language, 1956, 2nd rev. ed. (Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1971), 91-92, 94. Jakobson’s governing assumption is that “The development of a discourse may take place along two different semantic lines: one topic may lead to another either through their similarity or through their contiguity. The METAPHORIC way would be the most appropriate term for the first case and the METONYMIC way for the second, since they find their most condensed expression in metaphor and metonymy respectively” (90). I follow Jakobson to some extent in locating the discursive predilections of Erasmus close to the “metaphoric pole” and the discursive practices of Scholastic theologians at or near the “metonymic pole.” 83 The distaste Erasmus has for Scholastic theology is expressed over and over in the Ratio not least as follows: “Those who coat their palate and tongue with wormwood taste the wormwood in whatever they then eat or drink … So to those who have spent a good part of their lives in the Bartoluses and Balduses, in the Averroës, in the Holcots, Bricots and Tartarets, in sophistical quibbling, in hotch-potch summulae and collections —to these divine literature does not have its true taste but the taste they bring to it” (129). 84 Robert D. Sider, “Preface,” New Testament Scholarship, xxix. 85 See chapter 2: 45-53. 115 86 Hugh Bredin, “Roman Jakobson on Metaphor and Metonymy,” Philosophy and Literature 8.1 (April 1984): 89-103; p. 100. Bredin offers a stimulating critique of the logical limitations and terminological confusions of Jakobson’s binary theory of tropes. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/phl.1984.0056 Accessed 19 May 2021. 87 This contrasts with the notion of Georges Poulet, in his “Phenomenology of Reading” (see n58 to this chapter), of “my I” being “on loan to another” who “thinks, feels, suffers, and acts within me” in the act of reading. Instead of a reader’s Self being occupied or taken over by the Other, Erasmus envisions the merging, or marriage, of Self and Other in the act of reading, where “the flesh made Word” is metaphorically “made one flesh.” 88 See “Introduction” above, chapter 1: 12-15. 89 Lana Cable, “Licensing Metaphor: Parker, Marvell, and the Debate over Conscience,” Books and Readers in Early Modern England: Material Studies, ed. Jennifer Andersen and Elizabeth Sauer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 244. See chapter 1: 10-12, for how Adrian Johns’ The Nature of the Book endorses such views. Chapter 4