Biblical Humanism and Scholasticism in the Age of Erasmus

The question of how to study the Bible permeates the Christian tradition throughout its history. In the western Middle Ages the text of the Bible was approached by using the dialectical disputation developed after the eleventh century in the increasingly complicated Scholastic method. At the very end of the fourteenth century new historical and philological methods began to be favored. This in turn led to an awareness of the original languages of Scripture to which are attached the names of scholars such as Giannozzo Manetti, Johannes Reuchlin, Desiderius Erasmus, Juan Luis Vives, Martin Luther, and Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples. Together with a high regard for the Hebrew and the Greek texts, a beginning was made in the methodology of source criticism, a study of Patristic and Jewish (philological) commentary, and a confrontation of the Latin translations with the originals. All of this gave rise to a confrontation between members of the faculties of arts and those of theology at universities such as the new foundation at Louvain and the University of Tübingen.

The present volume presents aspects of this debate in a set of articles under four headings: (1) The reaction against biblical humanism in Spain (Carlos del Valle Rodríguez,Alejandro Coroleu, and Charles Fantazzi), (2) The Faculty of Theology at Paris and the "Theologizing Humanist" (Guy Bedouelle and James K. Farge), (3) The campaign against biblical humanism at the University of Leuven (Cecilia Asso, Marcel Gielis, and Paolo Sartori), and (4) Critics of biblical humanism in sixteenth-century Italy (Paul F. Grendler, Nelson H. Minnich, and Ronald K. Delph). These four sections are preceded by Erika Rummel's introduction and by two essays: John Monfasani,"Criticism of Biblical Humanism in Quattrocento Italy," and Daniel Ménanger,"Erasmus, the Intellectuals, and the Reuchlin Affair." A general bibliography and a useful index complement the volume.

The volume as a whole seeks to focus on the controversy between humanists (concentrating on Reuchlin, Erasmus, and Lefèvre d'Étaples) on the one hand and Scholastics (such as Martin Dorp, Jacob van Hoogstraaten, and Luis de Carvajal) on the other. The essays give fascinating close readings of these controversies. Moreover, there are often interesting asides with regard to the fortunes of the debate in connection with political change. A case in point is the falling away of the patronage of the French court for the humanist approach when King Francis I was captured by Emperor Charles V at the Battle of Pavia (1525). In another telling case, Paul Grendler shows how important the stimulus of the papacy was for the endeavors of the highly important philological approach of Sante Pagnini. All in all, Erika Rummel is right in pointing out that the humanist and Scholastic parties learned much from each other and that their views were far from being mutually exclusive: "They clashed only when the parties insisted on the exclusive merit of their approach or expertise" (p. 13). As an historian of the pedagogical tradition, she wisely sums up: "With the assimilation of humanism into the theological curriculum, the debate between scholastics and biblical humanists lost much of its urgency and gradually abated" (p. 13). This remark indeed raises the question whether a second volume might not be useful in which an analysis would be given of the variety of Catholic and Protestant approaches to the philological exegesis of the Bible in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.