5. Reformers of Doctrina

Lorenzo Valla

Raised in a sophisticated Roman milieu—both his father and his maternal grandfather were legists attached to the papal Curia—Lorenzo Valla nonetheless had no university training. Instead, his family provided tutors in Greek and Latin and through the Curia he had contact with a stream of learned visitors, like the Florentine humanist Leonardo Bruni (d. 1440), who spent a good deal of time with the twenty-year-old Valla during his stay in Rome as envoy of the Florentine republic (1426). Like his teacher Coluccio Salutati (d. 1404), Bruni vigorously defended the humanist intellectual program articulated by Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca, d. 1374). Contrary to the pretensions of the “ridiculous Aristotelians” who dominated university faculties of liberal arts, Petrarch and his disciples understood the aims of education in terms of Cicero’s ideal of the orator. If scholastic logic had formed a contentious race of “modern sophists,” what Cicero had called the studies of humanity (studia humanitatis: poetry, rhetoric, history, moral philosophy) would form not just eloquent speakers but men deeply conscious of their civic responsibilities; for as Cato had said, an orator was by definition “a good man skilled at speaking [vir bonus dicendi peritus].” ^[1] When Valla saw a university classroom for the first time, it was as a lecturer on rhetoric (1431–1433) at the University of Pavia. Pavia was a stronghold of Latin Averroism, rather like the University at Padua, where Petrarch had written his On My Own Ignorance and That of Many Others to combat what he saw as the irreligious dogmatism of young scholars in the faculty of arts. To this ongoing debate Valla brought his grasp of the new humanist learning and the fresh perspective of an autodidact in traditional university subjects like dialectic (logic).^[2] After leaving Pavia, while earning his keep through secretarial positions at the Roman Curia or at the royal court of Naples, he worked out in the corpus of his writings nothing less than a root-and-branch alternative to scholastic doctrina.

While still at Pavia Valla completed an early version of his first major work, the dialogue De Vero Bono (On the True Good). His purpose was to refute certain learned men who contended that salvation could not be limited to believers in the true God because ancient pagans were capable of a virtue not inferior to that of Christian saints. Valla chooses the Stoics, those most strenuous of classical philosophers, as the defenders of a virtus based on reason alone and has them represented by the first speaker in his dialogue. The second speaker argues in behalf of the rival Epicurean school’s belief that pleasure, not virtue, is the true good: for Epicureans, those heroic suicides thought by Stoics to have chosen death over dishonor—Lucretia, raped by the son of a king, or Cato the Younger, facing the tyranny of a victorious Caesar—died in fact not for some imaginary good called virtue or “probity [honestas]” but rather to escape a life filled with real trouble (molestia), that is, the opposite of pleasure. The third and final speaker, presenting the Christian view, chides his predecessor for not recognizing that happiness with God in heaven is the highest of all pleasures but endorses the Epicurean attack on the Stoics.^[3] For the Christian the claim that any school of philosophy can attain a life of virtue is nothing but a sham; from St. Paul’s heartfelt cry about the law of the flesh that made him still a prisoner to sin (Rom. 7 : 23–25), it is clear that “the mind of a wise man cannot be possessed of that tranquillity and serenity of which lying philosophers always boast.” The conclusion is obvious: “Let philosophy therefore depart from the most holy temple, let her depart I say, and take herself off like a painted prostitute.” ^[4]

Yet philosophy could not be pulled down from her throne in the academy without confronting the massive authority of Aristotle. Earlier humanists, notably Bruni, sought to outflank the scholastics by noting the inadequacy of their Latin translations of Aristotle. Valla aimed at nothing less than refuting “Aristotle and the Aristotelians, in order to recall modern theologians from error, and bring them back to true theology.” This was the goal of Repastinatio Dialecticae et Philosophiae (The Uprooting of Dialectic and Philosophy), the earliest version of his treatise on dialectic, begun at Pavia and completed during his years in Naples.^[5] Valla repeatedly defends usage (usus) or “popular speech [popularis sermo],” which he considers the guide to correct speaking (magister loquendi), against the distortions of the Peripatetic or Aristotelian philosophers, whom he calls “a nation given to the corruption of native meanings” of words.^[6] The attempt to tear up Peripatetic philosophy by its linguistic roots begins with an attack on the “ten categories” of Aristotle’s logic, traditionally understood as defining not merely the basic rubrics of human thought but also the constituent properties of being. But “being” itself, the most important of the ten categories and the foundation stone of Aristotelian and Thomistic metaphysics, falls by the wayside as Valla analyzes “a being [ens]” to mean simply “a thing [res] that is,” so that the emphasis falls on res rather than on the property of existence, which properly speaking belongs only to God.^[7]

If Aristotle’s rationalism distorts the meaning of words, it distorts even more a proper and Christian understanding of human nature, especially as regards moral virtue. How can one defend a philosopher who could say that it was “indecent for anyone to say that he loves Zeus”? As for the foolish notion that emotions belong to an inferior part of the soul that passes away at death, “the spirits of the dead, who have spoken or shown themselves to many…could have taught [Aristotle] that they…are not lacking in feelings.” Humans differ from the animals not by virtue of reason—for animals have the ability to reason, Aristotle’s opinions notwithstanding—but by virtue of having been created in the image and likeness of God.^[8] In an Aristotelian conception of virtue it is reason that commands the will, but in truth reason is not even the teacher of the will, much less its commander: “The will is not taught; rather, native disposition [ingenium] teaches itself by its own labor, with the help of memory.” Aristotle’s understanding of virtue as the mean between two extremes is logically flawed (it is more precise to see each virtue as the contrary of a single vice) and contrary to Scripture, for it is not the hot or the cold but the lukewarm who will be vomited forth from the mouth of God (Apocalypse 3 : 15). Because virtue is in the emotions (affectus), not in the intellect, Aristotle’s notion that virtue is a habit acquired by practice is equally useless: “Teachings [doctrine] are indeed acquired gradually and by certain steps, as if climbing up, but virtues can come without gradations and by a certain impetus and (if I may so put it) flight.” ^[9] For Valla the “seat of the soul” is neither the intellect nor the will but “the heart [cor]”: “It sustains and moves and warms other members of the body, like sun which, remaining in its place, trembles and excites the whole world, suffusing it with light and heat.” The distinction between intellect and will is artificial, for it is “the one soul that understands and remembers, inquires and judges, loves and hates.” So too “love [charitas] is the only virtue, for it is love that makes us good”; for example, fortitude is the name for love “when it is called into strife,” as with the apostles “who from cowards became the bravest of men when they received the Holy Spirit, Who is the love of the Father and the Son.” ^[10]

For a doctrina that responds to this dynamic conception of human nature, Valla turns to rhetoric and especially to grammar, whose task it is to restore the Latin language to its former beauty and power. Elegantiae Linguae Latinae Libri VI (Six Books on the Elegance of the Latin Language), another work of his Neapolitan years, gives the correct or classical form for some four thousand locutions (at “about eighteen” the young Erasmus made a précis of the Elegantiae for a local schoolmaster).^[11] Prefaces to the several books extol pure Latin as the mother of civilization. During the many centuries when “no one could speak proper Latin,” the liberal arts declined and allied arts “such as painting and sculpture and architecture wholly degenerated and were in the same moribund state as letters.” But now that both letters and the visual arts are showing new life, “I am confident that the language of Rome will come back strongly…and with it all those disciplines will be restored to health.” With the fall of Rome, “Goths and Vandals” imposed on the Roman world not just their rule but their barbarous language, corrupting Latin script^[12] as well as the Latin tongue. One need only compare the “ornate and golden” Roman civil law to canon law, “which is for the most part Gothic.” As for the books of scholastic philosophy, “which not even Goths and Vandals can understand,” readers are referred to Valla’s On Dialectic. Only a beautiful language is suited to the praise of God: by restoring Latin to its former state, “we adorn the house of God, so that those entering the building will not be moved to contempt by its squalor, but rather excited to devotion by its splendor.” Though a theology student may forgo learning one or another of the arts, “if he be ignorant of eloquence, he is in my opinion utterly unworthy to speak of theology.” ^[13]

In the Augustinian program Scripture itself is the doctrina by which hearts are molded to the love of God, and for Valla Scripture needed purification from error at least as much as the Latin language did. His Collatio in Novum Testamentum (Comparison of the [Greek and Latin] New Testament) exists in two versions. The one done in Naples is known by this title and the other, done after Valla’s return to the papal court and eventually published by Erasmus in 1505, is known by the title Erasmus gave it, Adnotationes (Annotations). In both versions Valla aims to correct the Latin Vulgate against the Greek: if St. Jerome (d. 431) in his day complained that “the stream flowing from the fountain [fons]” had become troubled with textual errors, “the stream that was never properly cleansed has collected slime and dirt” in the subsequent millennium. Valla detected^[14] hundreds of minor errors or inaccuracies in the Vulgate text and exposed what a modern scholar calls “an astonishing mistranslation” at 1 Cor. 15 : 51.^[15] Yet in dealing with the New Testament Valla held his usual boldness^[16] in check; the conjectural emendations that are the hallmark of his editions of classical authors are entirely lacking in the Collatio.^[17] Here and there in the Adnotationes one can see signs of his tendency to defend human passions, as when he wonders why Christ should have condemned anyone who looks at a woman with desire (concupiscentia) in his heart (Matt. 5 : 28); perhaps, he speculates, the Greek word should be translated “wife” or “matron” rather than “woman.” ^[18] But in his sober exposition of the Greek fons of Gospel doctrine Valla provided an inspiration for Erasmus, and by refraining from critical examination of the Greek text itself he left room for the next great pioneer in humanist philology.^[19]

Juan Luis Vives

Juan Luis Vives (1492–1540) was born in Valencia of Jewish parents who had converted to Christianity. Following an education in his native city which included some Greek, he received a thorough training in scholastic logic at the Collège de Montaigu in Paris (1509–1512). Breaking off his university career, Vives found a home among the long-established Spanish merchant community in Bruges, where local humanist scholars secured him a position as tutor to a prominent young aristocrat, Guillaume II de Croy, who was about to begin his studies at the university at Leuven.^[20] Here Vives met Erasmus, who not only encouraged his ambitions but, with Thomas More and others, organized a publicity campaign to promote Vives’s first published work, a humanist critique of scholastic logic.^[21]In Pseudodialecticos (Against the Pseudo-Dialecticians, 1520) attacks Parisian dialectic but not its Aristotelian premises. Like Valla, Vives considers usage the teacher of speech: grammar, rhetoric, and logic “do not teach language [sermo], rather they accept as a given the language spoken by the people.” But scholastic logic in Vives’s day routinely pressed words into unaccustomed phraseology in order to evaluate different types of “supposition” or predication. For example, the proposition “Thou a man art not” (if addressed to something nonhuman) could be true in a material sense but “strictly speaking [de rigore]” false, because “a man” was placed before the verb. For Vives the role of the logic of suppositions in the university curriculum was “like a Trojan horse, from which has come the ruin and conflagration of all the liberal arts.” Unlike Valla, however, Vives did not see Aristotle himself as a corrupter of good usage: “Does anyone think that Aristotle accommodated his dialectic to a language he made up himself, rather than to the common Greek spoken by all the people?” ^[22] Vives’s aim was thus to restore logic to its Aristotelian clarity, and for this plan Erasmus praised him lavishly, comparing his own efforts to “restore theology…to its ancestral dignity” with Vives’s endeavors to “recall studies in the university to better things.” ^[23]

Just as Vives was beginning to make his reputation, news came that the Inquisition in Spain had arrested his father on charges of secretly practicing Judaism (1522); following his trial the elder Vives was burned at the stake in 1524. A few years later Vives’s mother, though dead since 1509, was tried posthumously for the same offense and her bones were exhumed in order to be burned. Vives’s extant writings contain not a whisper of these terrible events; indeed, the fate of his parents was not known to historical scholarship until the documents were published a few decades ago.^[24] Meanwhile, Erasmus had recruited Vives to assume responsibility for The City of God in the edition of St. Augustine’s works to be done by his publisher, Johann Froben in Basel. In his preface (1522) Vives lauds Erasmus as the restorer of true theology and explains that since he is a “profane man” (that is, a layman), his annotations on theological issues “will be more sparing than on other matters.” The annotations do in fact deal mostly with grammar, or classical literature, or Augustine’s Roman world, but occasional comments make it clear that Vives understood well enough the distinctive emphases of Augustine’s theology. A propos of Augustine’s comment that the body is not a mere ornament but “pertains to the very nature of man,” Vives contrasts Augustine’s “truer opinion” with that of the Platonists, for whom “the soul alone was man and the body something put on like clothing, or rather a prison.” Where Augustine says that even the most praiseworthy “yield in some things to carnal concupiscence,” Vives adds that nature has implanted sexual desire so deeply in the hearts of all besouled creatures “that we cannot even think of satisfying that desire without being touched by a certain hidden pleasure, which some consider at least a venial sin.” The views on sexual pleasure which Vives himself expounded in two later treatises on marriage have been characterized by a modern scholar as “almost Manichean.” ^[25] A sternly Augustinian view of the power of sin in human life was perhaps of some solace to a man whose parents had been so brutally stripped of life and reputation.

The premature death of young Croy (1521) left Vives without a livelihood, and for the next several years, with the help of Erasmus’s friend Thomas More, he hunted for patronage in England, albeit without much success.^[26] It was during this period of his life that Vives turned his thoughts to some of the great public issues of the day. Not surprisingly, his writings on war and peace appropriate some of Erasmus’s views, for example, the idea that wars come about because young noblemen are bored by their idleness in times of peace and because self-serving councillors fill the heads of young princes with dreams of emulating the glory of Caesar or Alexander the Great.^[27] But De Europae Dissidiis et Bello Turcico (On Europe’s Wars and the Campaign against the Turk, 1525) advances an idea that would have shocked Erasmus. Toward the end of a dialogue in which the shades of ancient and modern dead discuss Europe’s sad state, the great Scipio, hitherto silent, proposes that Europe’s Christian princes, raging against one another in blind fury, can satisfy their overweening ambition “more lavishly and copiously” by warring against the Turk; the vast riches of Asia lie open, for “Europe has never invaded Asia without capturing and holding it,” because “Asians are timid men little suited to war, more like women than men.” ^[28]

De Europae Dissidiis conveys stereotypes about Asia conventional in European literature from the time of the Greeks,^[29] but it hardly reflects military reality in an era when the armies of Sultan Suleiman the Lawgiver (1520–1560) seemed invincible. Much better grounded in everyday life is Vives’s De Subventione Pauperum (On the Subvention of the Poor, 1526), which mirrors the grim social realities of the great industrial cities of Flanders and helped provoke discussion that led to the eventual adoption in much of Europe of poor laws aimed at centralizing the control of charitable agencies and putting sturdy beggars to work. Vives excoriates the tribes of beggars who “extort rather than plead,” importuning pious burghers even at mass. Meanwhile, though “the rich from their superfluity can support horses, dogs, whores, and elephants,” the honest poor “gnash their teeth in indignation, because they lack the wherewithal to feed their starving children.” In many an urban civil war, he notes, the angry multitude has “vented against the rich the first evidence of its fury.” Hence magistrates make a grave mistake if they think they are “put in office to decide disputes about money, when they ought to think more about how to make their people good citizens.” ^[30] In other words, just as it would profit the Christian commonwealth if princes slaked their thirst for empire at the expense of infidels, magistrates can both safeguard the property of the wealthy and improve the morals of their citizens by providing relief for the deserving poor while subjecting the unruly poor to the discipline of work. Vives did not inhabit a world in which human kindness was strong enough to contain human cruelty; his was a world ruled by sin—we may call it an Augustinian world—in which the best hope of struggling humankind lay in turning from greater evils to lesser ones.

Vives’s major works, dating from the last decade of his life, provide a bridge between early tracts on the humanist reform of the curriculum and the sober appraisals of practical reform in his treatises of the 1520s. De Anima et Vita (On Life and the Soul, 1538) features a rich and nuanced analysis of human passions, while De Tradendis Disciplinis (On the Handing on of Disciplines, 1532) describes how liberal learning can be an auxiliary force in the struggle to keep passion under control. Vives is more optimistic than Valla about reason’s place in the kingdom of the soul. In a passage reminiscent of humanist arguments about whether a wise councillor can influence his prince to the good (as in the first book of Thomas More’s Utopia), De Anima compares the will to a sovereign prince who can command his councillors to give him advice and then decide to ignore it. But Vives rejects the argument that animals can reason and, again contrary to Valla, believes that reason can indeed function as the “adviser [consultrix],” even the “teacher [magistra]” of the will.^[31]

In order to play its proper role reason needs the help that a liberal education can provide. De Tradendis aims to make the liberal arts suitable for use in the education of the soul by drawing them “from pagan darkness into the light of our faith.” ^[32] For Vives, as for Valla, the pagan model of human behavior is one that sharply divides reason from emotion, while the Christian (or, one may say, Augustinian) model is one that recognizes their interpenetration.^[33] In the section “The Causes of the Corruption of the Arts,” Vives departs from the humanist paradigm according to which the pure fons (spring) of a putatively pristine antiquity can be taken as the standard against which to judge the turgid waters of modernity.^[34] From their earliest beginnings, he contends, the arts were corrupted by an undue admixture of human passion (affectus), so that, for instance, legists deliberately made their precepts as complicated as possible and philosophers put forward foolish ideas “out of lust for making a name for themselves.” If the text of Aristotle has indeed been corrupted by bad translations, “water from this spring [fons] was already turbulent when it went into the pipe,” for on some topics (like rhetoric and poetry) Aristotle was not free of the philosopher’s lazy habit of repeating the opinions of others rather than thinking things through for himself.^[35] Through their pagan origins the arts as they have been handed down are especially corrupt in their understanding of morals. Fortunately, Lorenzo Valla has shown that Aristotle was wrong about virtue being a mean between two extremes and that virtue is a vehemence of feeling (energeia) rather than a habit of the intellect; for if one compares the Beatitudes in the Gospel with Aristotle’s concept of happiness (beatitudo) on earth, it is clear that “if Aristotelian happiness is to be sought here on earth, the happiness of Christ is not to be sought.” As for the poets, “Homer expresses his image of the ideal prince in Achilles, than whom no one was more truculent or inhumane.” Orators imagined that to learn eloquence is to learn wisdom—as in Cato’s dictum that an orator is “a good man skilled at speaking”—but even Cicero glimpsed the truth of the matter when he said that teaching evil men to speak well is like giving weapons to madmen.^[36]

In truth, piety is the goal of Christian schooling, and for Vives “piety is more a matter of behavior [actio] than a matter of expertise [peritia].” Yet no “knowledge of things” is in itself harmful to piety, not even if such knowledge comes from books written by pagans or Muslims or Jews. Moreover, in the struggle against that domination of our nature by passion which is the legacy of Adam’s sin, we must learn to know ourselves inside and out, especially “by what things passions are aroused or increased, and by what things they are checked, calmed, taken away”; to this end we may summon “the precepts of moral philosophy, like an army.” In the same way, history rightly taught—not the kind of history that glorifies an Alexander or a Caesar—is the “nurse” of the kind of prudence (prudentia) required to rule cities and peoples, “for what greater prudence is there than to understand by what things the passions of men are either aroused or quieted?” ^[37] The school Vives has in mind must isolate boys from girls and must not be located near a princely court or in a mercantile city; masters should be paid from the public purse and not by pupils; and boys should if possible live at home so as not to risk exposure to shabby and impure masters of the common type. Boys need public disputations to spur their competitive spirits, but not so often as to provide occasions for arrogance and boasting. If education is to “bring the Christian people back to true and genuine simplicity,” the liberal arts must have “fewer of those sparks by which souls are set ablaze”; students do not need to have their critical judgment “sharpened on the whetstone of depravity” if the goal is to make them “not more cunning [astutiores], but more prudent.” ^[38] To such a school a father may send his son not to gain riches or honor but for “cultivation of the soul [cultura animi], a rare and precious thing, so that the young man becomes learned and through sound teaching [doctrina] advances in virtue.” ^[39]

John Calvin

Martin Luther (1484–1547) imbibed the principles of humanist philology at the margins of a typically scholastic theological education.^[40] John Calvin (1509–1564), born a generation later, received his legal education from humanist scholars who had set aside the glosses of medieval commentators in order to return to the fontes of ancient Roman jurisprudence. Calvin’s earliest works were a commentary on Seneca’s De clementia (1532) and a refutation of heretical ideas about the “sleep of souls” prior to the Last Judgment (1534); the latter showed a deep familiarity with the works of humanist pioneers in biblical philology, like Erasmus and Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples (1465–1534), whom Calvin visited just before leaving France for Protestant Basel. Thus when Calvin gave himself heart and soul to the new theology, he carried into his career as a reformer “humanist linguistic and textual techniques for the interpretation of Scripture” as well as a characteristically humanist sense of “the importance attached to the study of the Fathers” and “the acceptance of a kind of Christian philosophy.” ^[41] As part of an ongoing polemic with erstwhile confreres in the French humanist movement,^[42] he was therefore able to employ humanist conventions about the reform of doctrina in the service of a theological teaching utterly at variance with humanist optimism about the moral endowments of the human soul.

The final Latin edition of Calvin’s summary of Christian doctrine, the 1559 Institutio Christianae Religionis (Institutes of the Christian Religion) is the one Calvin himself regarded as definitive.^[43] The Institutio’s use of a favorite humanist metaphor provides the clue to a radical shift in perspective. For humanists like Valla and Vives, as for St. Jerome, the contrast between fons (spring) and rivuli (streams) denoted the difference between an original text and the copies or translations derived from it; by analogy, the same contrast could also describe other forms of dependence on an originating principle.^[44] But for Calvin no human or created instrument, not even Scripture, could properly be called the source of anything good: God and God alone is “the wellspring [fons] of all good things…nowhere will be found even a drop [gutta] of wisdom and light, or justice, or power, or righteousness, or genuine truth, that does not flow from him.” In a related image, he maintained that such is the omnipresent power of God, as taught by Scripture, that “it is certain not even a drop [gutta] of rain falls without his express command.” ^[45]

If for Valla the decay of doctrina subjected the world to Gothic barbarism, for Calvin the decay of doctrina subjected the world to medieval superstition: if “papists” argued that religious images are the bibles of the poor, Calvin admitted that “there are today people who cannot do without such so-called books, but whence comes that stupidity of theirs, except that they have been deprived of the doctrina uniquely suited to form their minds?” The doctrina Calvin has in mind is of course that of Scripture, whose distinctive power is “evident from the fact that no human text, no matter how artfully crafted, can affect us nearly as much.” Like Valla and Vives, Calvin too believed that the test of doctrina was whether it could break through the hardness of the human heart: “The heart’s lack of trust is greater than the mind’s blindness, and it is harder to gird the spirit with confidence than it is to instill thoughts into the mind.” ^[46] Yet while Valla believed in the power of pure language to touch the heart and Vives reposed a like confidence in the prudentia that understands human passions, for Calvin the abnegation of self that Scripture commands “is something of which our souls are not in the least capable,” especially since self-love has so many disguises. In different ways Valla and Vives had both rejected the Platonic idea that the human propensity for evil comes only from the passions of the body, not from the aspirations of the soul. But Calvin went farther, insisting that the corruption of sin “is diffused through all parts of the soul,” so that “wicked impiety occupies the very citadel of the mind, and pride has invaded the vitals of the heart.” ^[47]

Yet from this impasse Scripture itself promises a way out: “There is no remedy but that love of conflict and self-love, noxious above all things, be torn up by the roots from our inmost vitals: as indeed they are torn up by the doctrina of Scripture.” What Scripture teaches is encapsulated in two complementary principles, bound together by a faith that trusts solely and entirely in God:

Above all, these two points are to be kept in mind, namely, that the glory of the Lord remain undiminished, as if under a sound roof, and that in the face of his judgment our consciences maintain a restful calm and a serene tranquility.…In a nutshell, no man may without sacrilege claim any particle of justice for his own, for in so doing he takes away and befouls just as much from the justice and glory of God.^[48]

It follows that in his critique of what pagan philosophers have said about the life of virtue, Calvin made none of the compromises that Valla and especially Vives were prepared to make. In Calvin’s view, even though Christian writers have acknowledged the power of sin, “many have been far too close to the philosophers” in their discussion of human nature. One of the speakers in Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods neatly expresses the problem when he says that virtue would be nothing to boast of were it a gift from God rather than a human achievement. For Calvin the native disposition (ingenium) in which philosophers (and Valla) placed such hope is real enough and not at all hopeful: because “an outstanding native disposition will not bear imperious mastery by another,” it is precisely those most apt for that self-glorification that philosophers would call virtue who are least able to suffer the discipline of God’s Word. Not that Calvin refused to recognize any difference between persons of great valor (Camillus, who saved Rome from an attack by the Gauls) and great wickedness (the emperor Caligula). Rather, Calvin in one place agrees with St. Augustine that the virtue of good emperors, like Trajan, amounted to the lesser vice of ambition, by which greater vices are held in check; in another, he says that the “most certain and the simplest” explanation of Camillus’s virtue is that it has to do “not with the common endowments of nature, but with special graces from God.” ^[49] Indeed it is the “special grace” of God, incomprehensible to human reason, that alone provides the tranquillity of soul of which philosophers boasted in vain:

However much [philosophers] may subscribe to Paul’s statement [Acts 17 : 28] that it is in God that we live, move, and have our being, they are nonetheless far from understanding the meaning of the grace whereof Paul speaks, for they have no inkling of the special care that God has for us, by which alone we come to know his favor towards us.

For Calvin, consciences plagued by doubts and troubled by scruples will never attain serenity “unless we seek it deeper than any human arguments or judgments or conjectures, namely, in the secret testimony of the Holy Spirit.” What the Spirit testifies in the heart of the believer is that God has chosen this one person to stand forever among his elect: “We will never be as persuaded as we ought to be that our salvation flows from the wellspring [fons] of God’s gratuitous mercy until we grasp that eternal election by which God grants his favor to some and denies it to others.” ^[50]

The clearest line of demarcation among these four thinkers is one that separates Calvin from Valla, Vives, and Erasmus. By insisting on the absolute sufficiency of divine grace and the absolute impotence of the human will, he negates the belief in the possibility of collaboration between nature and grace that the three humanists have in common. Yet there are differences too among the humanists. Valla differs from Erasmus in his thoroughgoing rejection of the claims of pagan philosophy, starting with a passionate attack on Aristotle’s logic (a topic in which Erasmus took only a mild interest) and a debunking of Stoic moral wisdom, similar to what Erasmus does in the Praise of Folly but not elsewhere in his writings. In contrast to Valla’s stress on the sovereignty of the will, not even teachable by the intellect, Erasmus shared a more conventional humanist belief in the character-building value of precepts,^[51] whether those of Seneca or those of Jesus in the Gospels. Vives differs from Erasmus by virtue of his sober grasp of human institutions; living among merchants, he understood something of the working of what would now be called market forces, and his reform treatises proposed checking one evil by a lesser one, just as in his pedagogical writings he stressed learning to recognize the incitements that touch off disorderly passions. Living among scholars, Erasmus preferred to hold up to the unruly world a standard or ideal defined by what he called the philosophy of Christ.

More important for the discussion in the following chapters, in a different sense Erasmus stands opposed to Valla, Vives, and Calvin.^[52] Despite their differences, the three other reformers of doctrina each laid claim to the broad intellectual heritage of St. Augustine. To be sure, the Augustine Calvin admired was less the author of De doctrina Christiana, an early work, than the author of the later treatises against Pelagius and his followers, which denied the human will any role at all in the process of salvation. (Even this Augustine was not “Augustinian” enough for Calvin, for he noted that “between us and Augustine there is this difference,” that though Augustine admits that the faithful while still in the body must needs burn with concupiscence, “he dares not call this malady sin.”)^[53] But contrary to some still prevalent impressions of the Renaissance humanist movement, it was not at all out of character for humanists to subscribe to some version of Augustine’s pessimistic doctrine of human nature.^[54] Valla may be called Augustinian in his emphasis on human passions and in his rejection of the mastery of reason over the emotions, as was taught in different ways by the ancient Stoic and Aristotelian philosophers. In his treatment of the relations between reason and the emotions Vives followed Aristotle more than Valla, but he too may be considered Augustinian in his understanding of the dominion of sin in the human soul and in human society.

Yet humanists were not necessarily disciples of Augustine. Erasmus in particular had the unusual distinction of being chided by contemporaries for being “unfair” to Augustine or for not taking his views into account.^[55] Certainly he took Augustine to task on many occasions—for accepting the legend (exposed by St. Jerome) that the standard Greek version of the Old Testament had been done by seventy scholars who all arrived independently at the same readings; for saying that one should rather starve to death than eat meat that had been offered to pagan gods; for being “mightily credulous”; and for having misread the New Testament in various places because of his inability to use Greek.^[56] Erasmus’s own preference for Jerome, the linguist and scholar among the Latin Fathers, is well known. When he listed eight Greek and Latin Fathers whose writings contributed to an understanding of Scripture, Augustine was last on the list; when challenged directly about his views on Augustine, Erasmus responded that he learned “more of Christian philosophy [philosophia Christiana] from one page of Origen than from ten of Augustine.” Elsewhere, he asserted that Augustine was not to be compared with any of the Greek Fathers and that among the Latins Ambrose and Hilary and even Cyprian were “more learned than he…but they wrote less.” ^[57]

There are several reasons why Erasmus may have found Augustine uncongenial. He himself was dubious about the religious value of monasticism (see below, chapter 7), yet St. Augustine was one of monasticism’s great patrons; unlike modern scholars, Erasmus questioned the authenticity of the rule attributed to St. Augustine, in use among the Augustinian Canons, but he recognized that its contents were closely paralleled in one of Augustine’s genuine letters. Augustine may even have been something of a bogeyman at one point in Erasmus’s life; the humanist’s account of being pressured into taking his final vows as an Augustinian Canon relates that one of the monks warned him of the danger that “St. Augustine in a temper would visit some great evil on [me] in return for the insult of [my] abandoning the habit, and of this he recalled several horrifying examples.” ^[58] Erasmus may also have been cool to Augustine because scholastic theology, with its penchant for dogmatizing, had found in that Father such a great authority:

The reason why the academic fraternity [scholasticae tribus] put Augustine above Jerome is that he is more frequently quoted by those authors who have acquired a despotic position in our universities, either because they have found him easier to understand, or because he defines things more assertively than they do.^[59]

Finally, Erasmus balked at Augustine’s vision of a human will enslaved to sin. In his annotation to Romans 5 : 11, he was “the first in the history of Western exegesis” to give a variant reading for the text long thought to be the clearest scriptural justification for the doctrine of Original Sin; for Erasmus it was “death entered in for all men in that all have sinned” rather than “ in whom [Adam] all have sinned.” ^[60]

At Rom. 7 : 23–25 (“the law of sin in my members…who will deliver me from the body of this death?”) patristic interpreters were divided as to whether the apostle’s words had reference to the power of sin in the life of a faithful Christian like himself or in the lives of sinful men before they were redeemed by divine grace. Lorenzo Valla (as noted above) used this passage to show the vanity of hopes that mere philosophy could calm the turbulent passions of the human breast. By contrast, Erasmus used it to show that the apostle often spoke in a persona other than his own; in other words, Paul himself was not the wretched sinner described in these words.^[61] Similarly, where St. Paul says (Rom. 9 : 16) “There is question not of him who wills, nor of him who runs, but of God showing mercy,” Erasmus in his 1517 Paraphrase on Romans added a gratuitous qualification: “Or rather, some part of it depends on our own will and effort, although this part is so small it seems like nothing at all in comparison with the free kindness of God.” These passages may help to explain why critics accused Erasmus of paying too little attention to Augustine and too much to Origen, who was a source for each of the readings indicated.^[62] Origen, if not Augustine, permitted Erasmus to believe that Christ’s yoke is indeed light (Matt. 11 : 30) because his teachings correspond to desires for peace and harmony deeply imbedded in human nature: “Whatever is according to nature is easily borne.” ^[63] Thus, Erasmus’s understanding of the philosophia Christi, unlike Valla’s, would stress that innate goodness in human nature to which pagan philosophers also appealed. In diagnosing the evils of Christian society, Erasmus, unlike Vives, would stress the wickedness of powerful men, not the intractable power of sin.

Notes