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The Rise and Fall of Renaissance France. R. Knecht J.
Читать онлайн.Название The Rise and Fall of Renaissance France
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isbn 9780007393381
Автор произведения R. Knecht J.
Издательство HarperCollins
The schoolmen, however, were not entirely to blame for Erasmus’s attitude: his mind was not well suited to philosophical or dogmatic speculation. For the present, he was interested in ancient letters, not in philosophy or theology. He attached himself to the circle of Gaguin whose Latin history of France, De Origine et gestis Francorum Compendium, was in the press. It was the first specimen of humanistic historiography to appear in France. The printer had finished his work on 30 September 1495, but two leaves remained blank. Erasmus helped to fill the gap by providing a long commendatory letter, his earliest publication.
By the spring of 1496, Erasmus had had enough of the rigours of Montaigu. He fell ill and returned to the Low Countries, but in the autumn he reappeared in Paris. This time, however, he gave the collège de Montaigu a wide berth and earned his living by teaching rich young men. Among them was William Blount, Lord Mountjoy, who took him to England in the summer of 1499. At Oxford, Erasmus met John Colet, under whose influence he broke with the theological systems of the Middle Ages and with the monastic ideal. But Colet’s intuitive interpretation of Scripture, without knowledge of the original languages, failed to satisfy him and he decided to improve his own knowledge of Greek. Following his return to Paris in February 1500, he completed the first edition of his Adages. In the preface, he castigated the schoolmen for their ignorance of ancient culture and their conceit.
While staying at Saint-Omer in 1501, Erasmus met Jean Vitrier, the warden of the Franciscan monastery, whom he grew to admire as much as Colet. It was under his influence that he composed his Enchiridion Militis Christiani, first published in Antwerp in February 1504. In this work Erasmus developed for the first time his theological programme, calling essentially for a return to Scripture. Every Christian, he argues, must strive to understand Scripture in the purity of its original meaning. Before he can do so, he must study the ancient orators, poets and philosophers, especially Plato. Avoiding the Scotists, he must follow the guidance of St Jerome, St Augustine and St Ambrose. Assisted by grammar and languages, he will seek the precise meaning, both literal and allegorical, of Scripture. Erasmus also develops his concept of the Christian life as a continual meditation on Scripture, not as a series of external observances. He no longer identifies Christian holiness with strict observance of the monastic rule, and rejects the notion that the perfect Christian needs to shun the world. Above all, he calls for the wider diffusion of the Gospel.
At the end of 1504, Erasmus returned to Paris after two years spent in Louvain. He set about restoring the New Testament to its original purity, and in March 1505, Badius printed Valla’s Annotationes as a kind of model for him. But in the autumn of 1505, Erasmus went back to England. Henry VII’s physician was looking for a master to accompany his sons to Italy. Erasmus accepted the post and in June 1506 found himself once more among his humanist friends in Paris. He translated two dialogues by Lucan and resumed work on his Adages. Two months later he continued his journey to Italy. As he crossed the Alps, he wrote a poem for Guillaume Cop in which he declared his intention to devote himself wholly to sacred studies.
In April 1511, Erasmus was back in Paris mainly in order to see his Encomium Morae (Praise of Folly) through the press. This famous work contains a satiric attack on current abuses, especially on worthless monks, vain schoolmen and warring popes. The message of the book is similar to that of the Enchiridion: we should look to realities rather than names, to a man’s life rather than his words, to the spirit rather than the letter of the law. Erasmus makes merciless fun of the schoolmen with their ‘Magisterial Definitions, Conclusions, Corollaries, Propositions Explicit and Implicit’, and of ignorant and conceited monks with their meticulous observance of tiny rules of dress and their total disregard of purity of life or apostolic example. The Praise of Folly was a huge popular success. Erasmus left Paris in June, never to return, but his influence lived on. His works continued to be published and read in the French capital for many years.
Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples
A leading French humanist of the late fifteenth century was Jacques Lefèvre. He was born at Etaples in Picardy about 1450, but we know little about his early life. After becoming an MA in Paris, he learnt Greek from Hermonymos while studying mathematics, astronomy and music. Like all keen scholars of his day he travelled to Italy, visiting Pavia, Padua, Venice, Rome and Florence. Wherever he went, he made friends with humanists and other scholars. After teaching in Paris for a few years, he returned to Rome, then visited Germany. On his return he took up a lodging at the abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés under the protection of the abbot, Guillaume Briçonnet, the future bishop of Meaux.
At first Lefèvre devoted himself mainly to the study of philosophy. In his approach to the subject he combined mystical tendencies with the precision of a mathematician. In February 1499 he published an edition of the Mystical Theology of Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite, a work that describes the ascent of the soul to union with God. Lefèvre’s admiration for Dionysius was unbounded: ‘Never’, he wrote, ‘outside Scripture, have I met anything which has seemed to me as great and as divine as the books of Dionysius.’ In April he published some works by Raymond Lull expressing the horror which he himself felt for Islam and Averroistic materialism. By 1501, Lefèvre had fallen under the influence of the fifteenth-century German cardinal and philosopher Nicholas of Cusa, from whom he learnt that Truth is unknowable to man and that it is only by intuition that he can discover God wherein all contradictions meet.
Lefèvre gave himself heart and soul to Aristotle, whom he translated and explained with boundless enthusiasm and whose many texts he edited after careful expurgations. He wrote commentaries for nearly all the Aristotelian works on the curriculum of the Paris schools. His aim was to set Christian doctrine on the firm foundation of an Aristotelianism freed from scholastic sophism. Yet, even as he explained Aristotle, his mysticism expressed itself. ‘While Aristotle writes of things that are deciduous and transitory’, he explained, ‘he is also treating of the divine mysteries. All this philosophy of tangible nature tends towards the divine things, and, starting from elements that can be sensed, opens the way to the intelligible world.’
He also looked to Plato. During his visit to Florence in 1492 he fell under the influence of Marsilio Ficino (1433–99), founder of the Florentine Academy, who interpreted the contemplative life as a gradual ascent of the soul towards always higher degrees of truth and being, culminating in the immediate knowledge and vision of God. Closely related to Ficino’s moral doctrine were his theories of the immortality of the soul and of Platonic love. Another Florentine humanist much admired by Lefèvre was Pico della Mirandola (1463–94), who sought to reconcile ancient philosophy with modern doctrines and Christian dogma. With Pico, as with Marsilio, philosophical speculation was fused with divine love. Like many of his contemporaries, Lefèvre was fascinated by the Hermetic Books. Thus, in 1494, he published Ficino’s Latin translation of the Liber de potestate et sapientia Dei, attributed to the Egyptian priest Hermes Trismegistus.
The ideas and theories which Lefèvre drew from so many sources ancient and medieval turned him from a philosopher into a theologian, but he remained a humanist. He was firmly committed to textual purity, proclaiming that ‘one should only ascribe to God what Scripture teaches about Him’. Thus he looked for the precise meaning of Scripture after ridding it of the barbarous language and useless subtleties of the schoolmen. Yet Lefèvre’s command of Latin was always heavy and clumsy. He also condemned most pagan poets, even preferring Battista Spagnuoli