Theology

5. Huizinga, Erasmus and the Age of Reformation (30 Jan 2026)

by kurto

An intellectual biography of a Dutch monk in print’s dawning era who effectively became the first of ‘public intellectuals’, and yet a Catholic whose humanism was only tangential to the Reformation.

Erasmus’ success turned on prodigious work-rate and philological genius combined with a highly aesthetic and ethical perspective. Prizing liberty of conscience, his bonae literae promoted moral education and general tolerance as the means of spiritual harmony.

For a theologian, Erasmus was little concerned with personal revelation. His youthful character had been delicate; he was obliged to moderate it, replacing sentimentality with wit expressed in elegant Latin; and his transition from literature to religion was no conversion. His mental growth reveals no defining crises, unusual for a great mind.

Highly prolific, Erasmus’ oeuvre subtly passed, almost imperceptibly to him, from emending Latin and Greek in order to simplify and clarify the original spirit of Christianity, to theological intervention and even innovation. Jerome was his favorite. The essentials of Christianity were ‘peace and unanimity’, and one should leave as many questions as possible to individual conscience.

At the dawn of Reformation, he characteristically avoided taking sides, to preserve independence. Consequently his influence was extensive but not intensive: he made nothing like Luther’s decisive mark on history.

Erasmus idealized the antiquity of Cicero, Horace, and Plutarch against an obscurantist medieval Church, whose allegories and scholastic syllogisms (including the work of the ‘baptised Hellenes’) he ridiculed. His individualism overlooked redeeming values of institutional forms and customs.

The Adagiorum Collectarea (1500) established his name. The 16th-century educated classes could now access hundreds (and later thousands) of classical proverbial sayings. Where scholasticism used technical systems of thought addressed the Bible, humanism turned on rhetoric and philology to express daily life, in the vernacular. Erasmus thus crossed ethics and common sense, ancient and contemporary life.

In Praise of Folly (1511) demonstrated the difference between foolishness and salutary myths that smooth over the intolerable with worldly wisdom, resignation, leniency. No creature is unhappy that lives in accord to its nature. The humor which enlivened Praise is what made Erasmus’ mind immortal. The Colloquia (1518) best captures his ideals: good morals born of Christianity, simplicity, moderation, kindliness, and toleration.

Erasmus disdained sinecures, so as to promote ecumenism, but was also constantly pleading his case of benefactors, and frequently relocating. He relished the new technology of publishing, often working in the printer’s office, and equally he enjoyed books as a product. Such immersion led to his producing a great many booklets and letters which would now be considered journalism or even polemics. (Important men were conscious many would read their correspondence, and newly becoming aware it would be published.)

The years 1516-18, mostly resident in modern Belgium, were his apogee of fame if not productivity. Ahead lay conflict with Luther, which would compel the ambivalent Dutchman to confirm himself Catholic, disappointing fellow intellectuals.

Huizinga is a consummate historian, well read of original sources, sympathetic to his protagonist, cautious of the unwarranted.

NB: caute legenda – to be read with caution.

1. Chenu, Nature, Man and Society in the Twelfth Century (24 Jan 2019)

by kurto

Studies currents of 12th-century Christian theology, a period of ferment and reform and also a bridge to the gains made by Thomas Aquinas and contemporaries in the following century. Contemporary theology encompassed practically all of intellectual life: science, philosophy, historiography, literary criticism (and particularly Biblical exegesis). But the conventional sequence of monastic patrism to scholasticism to Renaissance is simplistic. Institutional (i.e., Catholic) history and intellectual history are interdependent; positivism is poorly suited for understanding medieval theology because values drive the era’s fundamental sociopolitical constructs.

Symbolism was the first of two keystones of 12th-century epistemology. It conflated scientific explanation with signification. Monkish academics and the general populace alike believed all real things (i.e., natural objects, as well as historical events) could be portrayed in ways that revealed both their essence and broader meanings (‘signification’). It was metaphor dependent on fixed, transcendent realities, matching examples with Platonic concepts. If math shows the visible form of visible things and physics the invisible causes of visible things, symbolism manifests visible forms of invisible things. Thus history was man’s visible form of god’s will. Augustine’s symbols required pre-acceptance of faith, whereas Pseudo Dionysius’ symbols were autonomous.

The second was the predominance of hierarchy, which was akin to belief in evolution in the 20th. Hierarchy stood athwart Aristotelian concepts of science because the higher body subsumed the lower. In a hierarchical conception of the universe, wherein man predominated, causality and meaning were linked and each being was a ‘theophany’, a revelation of god.

Enter William of Conches, who identified three sources of causation: God, nature, man. The discovery of autonomous nature meant breaking with Augustinian doctrine, albeit God remained at the center. Theology benefited from a new rationality and Christianity (re)discovered nature and man’s place in the whole of the natural universe; of course there was disagreement over ‘natural determinism’ versus divine forces. Alain of Lille’s dictionary assigned 11 meanings to ‘nature’, a broad cast rather than systematic thought, and the distinction between science and nature came into sharper focus in the 13th century (with the help of reacquired Aristotle). Desacralizing the natural produced intellectual crisis for those who thought it was not important to know why, only that things were perfect, as divinely intended.

Yet the rediscovery of nature did not undermine but strengthened belief in value of symbols. Neoplatonic scholars downplayed the causality of man; however, Platonism was conducive to moral values and religion. Plato’s view of the soul as part of the cosmic order and so part of the functioning of order, in contrast to Aristotle who focused on the mind, aligned with Christianity. But there were problems (such as in the Timaeus) which clashed with creation or the trinity.      Avicenna was the preeminent source of Islamic Neoplatonism, Plotonius the premier Latin. The texts were partial and the translations average, so the results imperfect. Neoplatonism was not so influential as Aquinas building on Aristotle. Plato’s religious character attracted contemporary theology. Neos used their new understanding of reason to build up faith in mystery of God. The return to primitive apostolic life (see below) entailed rejecting the feudal cloister and finding God among the people, a neo-Platonist concept.

Over the century, piecemeal explanation (i.e., Aristotelian science) began to replace the generally irreducible meanings of symbolism. Simultaneously, allegory became more important, especially in literary forms. During the religious awakening of the last third of the century, exaggerated allegories were a kind of Judaic leavening of the Christian mysteries. The Roman Catholic church thought of itself as separate and closed, liked the Old Israelites, rather than the encompassing body of Christ. (What Moses concealed, Jesus revealed.) Christian theology drew heavily on Old prototypes. The Old Testament was used to illustrate (refine) the New. For example, the bishop was characterized as an Old Testament pastor, stressing moral governance, rather than in the role of teacher or prophet. Although the past was not left behind, the New came to transfigure the Old in institutional, behavior, temperament. (Only John of Salisbury introduced a new political analysis based on secular concerns.) The Old Testament provided examples of types to follow; but the types were not completely binding on the present.) Further, personification was used to ascribe value to pagan texts (poets) without straying into heresy.

The 12th century discovered history, initially the history of Christ and the church, but later more general affairs. It was to be learned according to a prescribed method, through chronology, not ideology, theology, or another dialectical process. Abelard made the past concrete and understandable, no longer the stuff of allegory or legend. Universal humanity had been an original feature of Christianity: now it added the universalism of time: ‘history was the narrator of events by which these things done in the past were sorted’. It was agreed the Roman Empire was the last of the ancients; the discovery of the Eastern empires in the 13th century pointed to new epistemological problems. John of Salisbury portended the 13th century’s discovery of Aristotle’s autonomy of nature (while also founding the practice of government administration based on function, not allegorical ‘mansion of princes’ from the Bible). Platonic influences (the ideas) tended to minimize events. Again pace John of Salisbury, for the first time secular events were to be evaluated for their own value. The discovery of history worked to strengthen what Chenu frequently calls the ‘economy of salvation’, the powerful role of Christianity in everyday life, as theologians became aware that not all events fit into allegory, symbolism, or church history. ‘Charlemagne was not Constantine’: they became aware of Western society, distinct from the Byzantine empire or Islam. Christendom became aware of its trajectory.

In the 12th century, Christians sought to return to apostolic life as compared to monkish work: the return to evangelism as a source of authenticity. The monasteries were by now responsible for tithing, hospitals, food distribution, travelers’ aid plus administration (such as tax collection). This was inconsistent with evangelism. Its procedures were endowed with sacred functions, but the glamor of ceremony undermined the vow of the mendicant. The monastery was the realization of St. Augustine’s city of God, but sacrificed elements of Christianity’s rejecting the world: it was a theocracy. At the same time, the cloister omitted the confrontation with the world that apostolic life demanded. Whereas the monastic view was Manichean (symbolism or allegorical), the evangelical outlook encouraged the discovery of laws of nature, application of reason, and so on as ‘real world’, as practical illustration of God’s design. The evangelical life encouraged proliferation of the force of worship. Christian life was no longer solely penitential and withdrawn. The rise of towns and the proliferation of non-feudal forms also acted to undermine monastic prestige. Evangelicals naturally found a home in secular institutions, for the gospel requires preaching to a new audience. It was to justify its existence and its truth that the church planted itself in the world. The 12th-century return to gospel guaranteed Christian presence in the world and guaranteed it would be of the world, evidence of Christianity’s ability to adapt. When Aquinas later defined transcendence of grace by invoking Aristotelian nature, he illustrated theological appreciation for nature, apostolic appreciation of man, and humanity’s appreciation of the church.

Lay apostles of the mendicant orders developed among the marginal townspeople of the new urban centers. Unlike monks and prelates, the mendicants were at home with the working poor. This dynamic led to translations of the Bible into vernacular, and also expanded monastic interpretations into apostolic views of scripture. The mendicants were the founders of the universities. This Biblical theology connected the literal and the spiritual in ways the monks of allegory and symbolic idealism had not. The master of the school had three values: to explicate, to dispute (to the resolution of questions), and to preach. The mendicants also developed a ‘scientific understanding’ of scripture by direct study of texts of the Bible.

The popes struggled to bring the mendicants under effective authority of the church, since the mendicants were developing their own rules of order based on theology. Pope Alexander III and Innocent III developed pronounced cultural views of elements of Christendom: ethnic, cultural, and political. But the state jurists were desacralizing the rulers – authority needn’t lie in the church. The mendicants were more at home than the conventional orders with the duality of church-state relations. Again, the model of Constantine was replaced by Charlemagne.

The 12th century saw the rise of the distinction between the cloistered theologian and the scholar (often, to be sure, the scholar of theology). Key steps in the professionalization of theology included faith fashioned into science (i.e., reason used to order faith, or pointed up that which requires faith). Traditional expressions took on an intellectual character. The question required that each competing alternate must have valid arguments. This pointed to independence from texts. Problems and solutions independent of text pointed to the summa. The scholastic quaestiones were different from Socratic interrogation or Platonic reduction and later Cartesian doubt and Hegelian dialectic. But there was no such unity (i.e., completeness) in canon law. The transition from monastic to scholastic theology marked a new intellectual age. The world of monks was a symbolic cosmos; especially post Aristotle (i.e., the discovery of nature), the scholastic world encompassed studies featuring rationally developed views of man and nature. Anselm and Abelard were the fathers of scholasticism.

In sum, the Christian faith and the church of the 12th century provided different currents within monastic, scholastic, canonical, and apostolic milieu. The autonomy of man and nature did not shatter the Christian world; Scripture remained primes inter pares. The balance of tradition and progress, of doctrinal and institutional development, was exemplified by the Fourth Lateran Council. The integrity of Christian faith was not jeopardized by the rationalized basis of theology, the new influence of the apostolic, or changing social mores. The foundations were laid for the great scholastic systems of the 13th century.