LIFE, CHARACTER, AND INFLUENCE OF VOLUME TWO CHAPTER I THE "NOVVM TESTAMENTVM" We now enter upon the year 1516. In February the New Testament was issued from the press of Froben, and it is incumbent upon us here to subject this work, which had cost Erasmus so much labor and anxiety, to a reasonable scrutiny. The text of the New Testament which had been universally recognized by the Church since about the year 620 was the text given to it by St. Jerome two hundred years earlier, and was known as the Latin Vulgate. Still earlier than this there was a translation dating probably from the middle of the second century and used until Jerome's appeared, known as the Vetus Itala, in contradistinction to the Vetus Latina. This latter text had been used throughout the entire Church as at that time constituted, which embraced portions of Spain, the parts of Gaul bordering on Italy, certain regions of northern Africa, besides the churches of Asia Minor. As a consequence of this, many foreign, archaic, and provincial expressions had crept into the various copies of the Scriptures in use in these widely scattered localities, so that Italy, where a higher degree of culture prevailed, was not pleased with this version, and the Vetus Itala was gradually substituted for the Vetus Latina. In the former, however, the Old Testament translation had been made, not from the Hebrew, but from the Septuagint or Alexandrine version, which was the ancient Greek translation in use at the time of Christ. Besides the Vetus Itala, Origen gives in his Hexapla partial translations executed by Aquila, Theodotion, and Symmachus. But no text could long remain stable, due to errors of copyists and imperfect knowledge of the Greek and Hebrew languages; so that in St. Jerome's time (330- or 342-420) there were so many discrepancies, both of text and translation, that he set himself to make a thorough revision and translation of the entire Scriptures, basing his work on a profound study of the text as found in the original Hebrew and Greek tongues. How well fitted he was for the task a brief survey of his equipment will show. He was born of Christian parents in the Roman province of Illyrium, and studied first under his father, after which he went to Rome and placed himself under the tuition of Aelius Donatus, who taught him Greek, rhetoric, and philosophy. Later on in life he traveled to the East, meeting on the way many saintly and celebrated men, among them St. Gregory Nazianzen at Constantinople. In 379 he was ordained priest at Antioch, and on account of the schism of Miletius of that city, he was sent to Rome to represent the matter to Pope Damasus, who was so pleased with his learning and eloquence that he retained him as his secretary. Already for many years he had devoted his attention to the matter of revising the Sacred Writings, and he finally went to the Holy Land, eventually fixing his residence at Bethlehem in 386 as head of the new monastery founded for him by St. Paula. Here, far removed from the noise of the world, he pursued the great literary work of his life, devoting himself especially to the study of Hebrew, without which he well knew no solid progress could be made in the translation of the Scriptures. This shows his peculiar fitness for the task he had set himself, that the three languages which were involved in the Scriptures were at his entire command, since Latin was his mother tongue, Greek had been taught him by Donatus. during his residence at Antioch, the greatest of Greek cities at that time. outside of Constantinople, and Hebrew he had mastered among the Rabbinical scholars of the Holy Land. But so careful has the Church been in all ages to scrutinize thoroughly any work dealing with the integrity of the Bible, that even St. Jerome experienced great difficulty in escaping the charge of heresy. Rufinus openly accused him of falsifying the meaning of certain texts, and even St. Augustine for a time had his doubts. Eventually the Vulgate, as St. Jerome's translation was finally named, became the universally received version of the Church; but very gradually, so that it was only under Gregory the Great that it received the papal sanction, after its author had been dead almost two hundred years. But in all the centuries preceding the age of printing, owing to the frailty of human nature, there crept into the various copies which were multiplied by the monks to serve their needs unfortunate errors; and in this way the texts of many copies became corrupt in some small detail or other. The wonder is, however, not that there were errors in the copying of the Scriptures, but that they were practically of little importance, since they did not in any case change the sense. Nearly fourteen hundred manuscripts of the New Testament still remain in existence, yielding to exhaustive research nearly one hundred and fifty variations, but, with one or two exceptions, showing no material difference. This wonderful fact has been attributed to the general Christian consciousness, which has sedulously though silently watched over the integrity of the Sacred Writings and has saved them from the chances. of time and circumstance. The Church was ever mindful of its duty to guard them unimpaired; and we find Alcuin appealing to Charlemagne to give him the necessary faculties of money and authority to collect the various copies of note throughout the empire and to revise them by comparing them with the original and more ancient codices. So, too, we find Archbishop Lanfranc of Canterbury in the eleventh century, and Cardinal Nicholaus in the twelfth, complaining of the corruptions in the text and trying their best to bring order out of chaos. But the vitiation of the text went on, until the Council of Trent in 1546 declared the Latin Vulgate the authorized version of the Roman Catholic Church, and made the necessary arrangements for the issue of an officially sanctioned edition. Several editions were issued for this purpose, but none was satisfactory until, in 1593, under the pontificate of Clement VIII, an edition of the Latin Vulgate was sent forth which intensive scholarship declared to be as correct and as nearly like the wording of St. Jerome as it was humanly possible to make it. This edition has since remained the standard and accredited edition of the Roman Catholic Church. Such being the condition of the Sacred Text at the time of which we have been treating, we may readily realize how tempting a field this was to the scholarly; but it would weary our readers too much even to mention the names of all those who essayed to do the work, which was eventually done in the Clementine edition spoken of above.1 How Erasmus yielded to the attractiveness of the undertaking is competent to our subject, and we shall endeavor to describe it accordingly. When he was in the monastery at Steyn, and rummaging through its stores of manuscripts, he ran across a copy of Laurentius Valla's De elegantia Latini sermonis, which charmed him to the degree that its author was ever afterwards one of his literary idols. Some time in 1503 or, possibly, 1504, he was in Louvain, when he was informed that in the Premonstratensian monastery of Parc there was a copy of Valla's Annotationes in Nouum Testamentum. Since this work had never been printed, he secured the loan of it, recopied it for the press, and issued it in 1505, as we have previously stated. This is the work that first made him acquainted with the uncertainty of the Vulgate text after its vicissitudes of a thousand years, before the art of printing was discovered. Immediately all his instincts as a scholar were aroused, and he was seized with a desire to continue the task that Valla had begun, and to excel him in the result. St. Jerome and Laurentius Valla were the two writers whose works mostly influenced and molded the literary character of Erasmus. But what a contrast there was between the two men: St. Jerome, the ascetic, the recluse, the lover of austerity and self-mortification, burning with zeal for the salvation of souls, but full of fear for the ultimate saving of his own, the friend of St. Gregory Nazianzen, St. Paulinus, and St. Pammachius, thoroughly learned but making humility the foundation. of his literary pursuits and always manifesting proper diffidence in his own personal judgments; Valla, on the other hand, the voluptuary, the 1 See Simon's Histoires critiques des versions du Nouveau Testament for exhaustive treatment. Now again, after some four hundred years, the Roman Catholic Church is undertaking another revision in the light of modern scholarship. The Book of Genesis is already complete; and by 1950, it is said, the Biblican Commission should have the complete text of St. Jerome's Latin version-freed from any existing errors. Until the work is completed, however, no change will be made in the familiar Vulgate now in use. "See Vol. I, p. 193. hanger-on of kings and courts, epicurean in taste and inclination, selfseeking, irreverent, totally devoid of spirituality, and a man who rejoiced in the making of enemies. Both were learned, but Valla not nearly so much as St. Jerome; for, besides the fact that Valla knew no Hebrew, he had not the advantage of the slightest knowledge of Chaldaic and the other Eastern languages into which the Scriptures had been translated, as had St. Jerome. The saint was always conscious that he was liable to mistakes, which, early in his career, had made him cultivate caution and humility. Valla had the fatal pride in his accomplishments which too often betrays literary men into absurdity and error. The saint made his scholarship completely subservient to his object; Valla made of his the ostentatious show which marks the pedant. The former sought to convince for truth's sake; the latter, for the sake of victory. St. Jerome, like all saints, was penetrated with a sense of his own deficiencies; Valla had the self-sufficiency of opinion which scholars are easily prone to entertain. But the greatest point of difference between them was that, while St. Jerome's labors were meant to be helpful and constructive, those of Valla were destructive of cherished beliefs, directed not so much that the truth might be made manifest, as that his own cleverness might be displayed. All of which, in a word, goes to prove that Valla was no saint. These two men, so different in almost every respect, had exerted a pull on Erasmus from opposite directions since his early days at Steyn. At various periods we can see the influence of first one and then the other preponderating. St. Jerome appealed to him as the highest, the holiest, and the noblest; Valla as the most attractive, fascinating, and appealing. It is related of St. Jerome, who in his youth was passionately fond of the profane authors, that he had a dream in which he seemed to be arraigned before Christ for judgment. He was asked his profession, and replied that he was a Christian. "Thou liest," said his judge, "thou art a Ciceronian, for the works of that author possess thy heart." Thereupon he was condemned to be scourged by angels, and the remembrance of the affair, after he awoke, was so vivid, and the impression left upon his mind so keen, that he decided to give up the reading of those authors and devote himself to the study and perusal of writings. pertaining to God alone. Erasmus might have admired St. Jerome's resolution, but he himself could never have imitated him in it. It may, however, have so tinctured his thoughts that his own Ciceronianus was a result. No man who ever lived could better apply to himself those words of Medea in Ovid: video meliora proboque. Deteriora sequor. We feel that at critical moments he must have reached out for help to St. Jerome, only to fall back the more decisively into the power of Valla. We know instinctively that St. Jerome is in the ascendant for the moment when we read these inspiring words from Erasmus' preface to the New Testament: So I beseech you, beloved reader, that you bring in turn pious ears and a Christian heart to the reading of this book. Let no man |