Humanism as Method: Roots of Conflict with the Scholastics

Author(s): Charles G. Nauert

Source: The Sixteenth Century Journal , Summer, 1998, Vol. 29, No. 2 (Summer, 1998),
pp. 427-438
Published by: Sixteenth Century Journal

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Sixteenth CenturyJournal
XXIX/2 (1998)

Humanism as Method:
Roots of Conflict with the Scholastics

Charles G. Nauert
University of Missouri-Columbia

Recent scholarship on Northern Humanism has asked whether humanist-scholastic

conflicts represent a clash of rival cultures or only isolated quarrels. Overfield favored
the latter view. Now Rummel challenges this conclusion, arguing that discourse
degenerated from polite discussion to cultural war.Two major issues emerged-
defense of orthodoxy, and professional competence to discuss certain questions.
Research must focus on humanism as an intellectual method which challenged tradi-
tion not only in the liberal arts but also in theology, law, and medicine. Scholars must
ask whether humanists (e.g., Lefevre and Erasmus) as professional rhetoricians under-
mined the scholastic quest for absolute truth. Second, they must ask how humanists
as experts in grammar (including textual criticism) lodged a claim to control the
ancient texts on which all traditional learning was founded. Both as an attack on dia-
lectic and as a movement for textual criticism, humanism constituted a fundamental
challenge to medieval intellectual tradition.

MoRE THAN TWO DECADES AGO, this journal published my article on "the clash
of humanists and scholastics" in the early sixteenth century.1 I wish to return to this
theme in order to assess where we are now in our effort to understand the encoun-
ter between the new humanist culture and the traditional scholastic culture in
Northern Europe. My hope is to review what we have learned since the Sixteenth
CenturyJournal published my essay in 1973, and then to identify some areas where
the scholarship of the intervening years has raised questions that need further study.
Erika Rummel's recent book, The Humanist-Scholastic Debate in the Renaissance and
Refrrmation, confirms the idea that a reconsideration of the humanist-scholastic
relationship is due.2 This book surveys the scholarship and then draws some frank
and well-founded conclusions about the relationship between the new academic
culture and the old. In between my article of 1973 and this book came many other
studies, notably James Overfield's 1984 book, Humanism and Scholasticism in Late
Medieval Germany, which advanced the study of the subject greatly but with which

*Charles G. Nauert,Jr., "The Clash of Humanists and Scholastics: An Approach to Pre-Reforma-

tion Controversies," Sixteenth Century Journal 4, no. 1 (April 1973): 1-18.
2Erika Rummel, The Humanist-Scholastic Debate in the Renaissance and Reformation (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).

Both this essay and the 1973 article are revisions of papers presented at plenary sessions of the Six-
teenth Century Studies Conference (in 1972 and 1996).The author acknowledges the financial sup-
port of Washington University for the 1996 presentation and the help of Professor Colette Winn,
president of that conference, in arranging the presentation.

427

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428 Sixteenth CenturyJournal XXIX /2 (1998)

Rummel expresses some important disagreements. Simply put, the issue is whether
the many documented incidents of conflict between the academic establishment
and the humanists amount to a fundamental cultural shift or are only a series of
more or less isolated disagreements that involved local issues and personal rivalries.
The latter position is essentially the conclusion drawn by Overfield. He argues that
even the Reuchlin affair, which is the only one of the humanist-scholastic conflicts
ever mentioned in general histories of the early sixteenth century, did not pit
humanists against scholastics but was a by-product of the raw anti-Semitism typical
of late medieval society.3
My earlier article agreed in part with the conclusions reached by both Over-
field and Rummel, not because I discovered how to uphold both sides of a debate
at the same time but because there is merit in both positions: there was no total
incompatibility between humanists and scholastics, who often coexisted peaceably
within the same academic community; nevertheless, there was always an undercur-
rent of suspicion and hostility, suggesting that underneath the petty local and per-
sonal feuds, there was something deeper, something that bred private tension and
occasionally open conflict. That is what I suggested in 1973, and that is what I
believe today. This opinion is broadly in harmony with Rummel's new book. So,
despite the often petty and local scale of their clashes, I do think that conflict
between humanism and scholasticism was inevitable. The Protestant Reformation,
of course, complicated this relationship; but it did not cause the conflict. A further
complication is that the broader humanist-scholastic encounter never attained a
resolution. Humanism lacked the capacity-and the ambition-to replace scholas-
tic learning entirely, while scholasticism did not have the decency to turn up its
toes and die, but in fact reasserted its dominance over the academic world in the
middle and later decades of the sixteenth century and remained powerful well into
the seventeenth century.
Any serious reflection on humanism has to go back to the pathbreaking essays
of Paul Oskar Kristeller, collected in his Renaissance Thought (1961).4 His thought
underlay Overfield's studies, in that Overfield demonstrates, exactly as Kristeller
argued, that in the German universities, humanism never for a moment became a
comprehensive philosophical system rivaling the Aristotelian systems that we label
scholastic. In Germany as in Italy, humanism was a limited cluster of academic sub-
jects, the studia humanitatis. Even at their most ambitious point, humanists never
claimed (as scholastics did) that their disciplines constituted the totality of human
knowledge. Kristeller suggests that something akin to interdepartmental rivalries in
modern universities may have been responsible for the conflicts.50verfield's study

3James H. Overfield, Humanism and Scholasticism in Late Medieval Germany (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1984), chap. 7, pp. 247-97, and his earlier article, "A New Look at the Reuchlin
Affair," Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History 8 (1971): 167-207. More recently, Hans PeterseJaco-
bus Hoogstraten gegen Johannes Reuchlin: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Antyjudaismus im 16. Jahrhundert
(Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 1995).
4Paul Oskar Kristeller, Renaissance Thought:The Classic, Scholastic, and Humanist Strains (NewYork:
Harper Torchbooks, 1961), esp. chaps. 1, 2, 5, 6.
5Ibid., 43.

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 Nauert / Humanism as Method 429

reaches essentially the same conclusion, though he also attributes much of the heat
to personal rivalries and personal idiosyncracies. The only two general attacks on
humanism produced in Germany were written not by scholastics but by humanists,
albeit very conservative ones,Jakob Wimpheling and Ortwin Gratius.6
The work of Kristeller and particularly of Overfield helped to direct scholar-
ship on Northern humanism toward study of the universities, and especially toward
the gradual penetration of the faculties of liberal arts by young humanists trained in
Italy who increasingly pressed for reform of traditional liberal arts education. The
history of this effort to reform the faculties of arts is well known. Overfield pro-
vides a good survey, and my own essay entitled "The Humanist Challenge to Medi-
eval German Culture"7 surveyed the diffusion of humanism through the German
universities. Nor was Germany the only country affected by this desire for educa-
tional reforms. New histories of Oxford and Cambridge show that the supposedly
immobile English universities significantly changed the nature of liberal arts educa-
tion during the sixteenth century, especially through the rise of the collegiate
system and growing reliance on the informal tutorial.8 In the Netherlands, the
growing influence of humanism at Louvain is well known. The development of
humanism in the arts faculties of Paris and the other French universities appears to
be less adequately studied. Certainly there is nothing comparable to the work that
James Farge has published on the Paris faculty of theology.9
The reforms enacted were substantial. At an increasing number of Northern
universities, Greek became a regular subject and specialists were hired to teach it.
Old textbooks-such as the Doctrinale in Latin grammar and the Parva logicalia in
dialectic-were abandoned after having been used for centuries and were replaced
with products of humanism such as Niccolo Perotti's Rudimenta for Latin grammar
and RudolfAgricola's De dialectica inventione for dialectic. In a symposium paper at
the Renaissance Society of America at Toronto in 1989, I surveyed some of the
scholarship that traces these changes.10 Anyone who samples this scholarship can

6Overfield, Humanism and Scholasticism, 329.

7Charles G. Nauert, "The Humanist Challenge to Medieval German Culture," Daphnis: Zeitschrft
fur mittlere deutsche Literatur 15 (1986): 277-306.
8Damian Riehl Leader,A History of the University of Cambridge, vol. 1: The University to 1546, gen-
eral editor Christopher Brooke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), and James McConica,
ed., the Collegiate University, vol. 3 of The History of the University of Oxford, general editor T. H. Aston
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1986).
9James K. Farge, Orthodoxy and Reform in Early Reformation France: The Faculty of Theology of Paris,
1500-1543 (Leiden: EJ. Brill, 1985); see also idem, Biographical Register of Paris Doctors of Theology,
1500-1536, Subsidia Mediaevalia, 10 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1980), and his
edition of the proceedings of the theological faculty, Registre des proces-verbaux de la Facultj de Theologie d
1' Universite' de Paris, de janvier 1524 a novembre 1533 (Paris: Aux Amateurs de Livres, 1990). There can
be no doubt that education in the studia humanitatis was available in the faculty of arts at Paris. For exam-
ple, George Huppert, Public Schools in Renaissance France (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984),
chaps. 4 and 5, shows that possession of the M.A. degree from Paris became a prime qualification for
applicants seeking positions in the new, humanistic colleges being established by many sixteenth-century
French municipalities. Further research is needed into the role of the humanities in the arts curriculum
at Paris.
10Charles G. Nauert, "Humanist Infiltration into the Academic World: Some Studies of Northern
Humanism," Renaissance Quarterly 43 (Winter 1990): 799-812, and bibliog. at 818-24.

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430 Sixteenth CenturyJournal XXIX /2 (1998)

see evidence of significant gains for the humanist reformers of liberal arts
education.
Most studies focus largely, sometimes exclusively, on humanist reform in the
lowest level of university education, the faculties of liberal arts. Despite the evi-
dence of deep-rooted conflict, no one seriously wants to return to the discredited
idea that Renaissance humanism constituted new philosophy that replaced a dying
scholasticism, thus ushering in the modern intellectual world. Kristeller is still cor-
rect: humanism was not a philosophy at all but at most a movement aiming to
improve society by reasserting the value of the studia humanitatis, a narrow cluster
of five subjects. In fact, as Kristeller observed, scholasticism itself was not a single
philosophical system. There were many scholasticisms. They agreed only in their
tendency to look to Aristotle for guidance and in their possession of a common
method of intellectual inquiry, the dialectical method. Nevertheless, this method,
as Peter of Spain confidently declared, claimed the capacity to investigate, classify,
and definitively resolve the major questions in all fields of learning; in his own
words: "Dialectic is the art of arts, the science of sciences, possessing the way to the
principles of all curriculum subjects."11
Erika Rummel's new book takes this discussion a long step farther. She thinks
that broader issues were in play than just the reorientation of liberal arts education.
She discerns a rising crescendo of conflict.Although criticism of scholastic learning
is common even in the work of early humanists like Petrarch, and a wide-ranging
attack on the supposedly pagan tendencies of humanism appeared in the Lucula
noctis of the Dominican friar Giovanni Dominici in 1405, discussion between
humanists and scholastics in fifteenth-century Italy remained moderate and civil.
The most famous such debate occurred in 1485 between Pico della Mirandola,
who had humanistic interests but also studied scholastic dialectic at Paris, and the
famous Venetian humanist, Ermolao Barbaro. Barbaro counseled against study of
the uncouth dialectic of the North, while Pico belittled rhetoric, the focal center
of humanist interests, as something deceitful, superficial, and unable to satisfy the
mind's hunger for truth.Yet the general tone of even this exchange is respectful and
friendly; and Rummel concludes that in such early debates, each side is willing to
concede some merit to the other. There is no fight to the death between rival
cultures.
But in the first two decades of the sixteenth century, as Northern humanists
began to demand significant reform of liberal arts education, the debate became
sharper. Humanists singled out specific individuals on the opposite side and ridi-
culed their trite, inelegant, and pointless teaching and writing, while conservative
scholastics not only took reprisals against outspoken young teachers who pushed
too hard for educational reform but also took specific measures to limit or ban the
use of nontraditional textbooks, to discourage the study of poetry and the classical
and biblical languages, and to justify the traditional curriculum. Conservatives
watched carefully for any intrusion by humanists-mere grammarians and rhetori-

llQuoted by Overfield, Humanism and Scholasticism, 30.

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 Nauert / Humanism as Method 431

cians, as they regarded them-into questions properly belonging to the three

higher faculties, law, medicine, and (above all) theology. As Kristeller suggested, this
was in part a defense of professional and academic turf. But it led to an increasingly
hostile tone on both sides and found its full development in the savage attacks by
conservative preachers and theologians on the application of humanistic textual,
historical, and linguistic skills to the study of the Bible by the two greatest figures
of Northern humanism,Jacques Lefevre d'Etaples and Desiderius Erasmus.
Two issues were involved in these attacks. One, of course, was defense of
orthodox doctrine; after the outbreak of the Reformation, this issue produced an
increasingly poisonous atmosphere.The second issue, closely linked to the first and
also to the question of professional qualifications, was the inherent validity of the
opponent's intellectual method, either dialectical or linguistic/philological. The
scholastic conservatives flatly declared that only their own traditional method,
based on dialectical argumentation and closely guided by the writings of earlier
generations of scholastic theologians, could provide sure guarantees of orthodoxy
in doctrine and catholicity in religious practice.They scorned Lefevre and Erasmus
as mere grammarians and opposed their application of humanistic scholarship to
religious texts as useless at best, and probably outright dangerous. Humanist criti-
cism was the work of "mere grammarians," such as Lefevre and Erasmus, who sup-
posedly lacked theological training and hence had neither a legal nor an intellectual
right to speak and publish on questions involving theology and the Bible.
The two great humanists, with somewhat greater caution since both of them
were determined to defend their status as orthodox Catholics, responded in kind.
Both of them-Erasmus far more clearly-insisted that the dialectical method of
the academic theologians had produced a theological science that concentrated on
trivial, abstruse questions of little or no real value to the needs of the church. Scho-
lastic theology, they charged, neglected full and reflective study of what the Bible
actually said. It forced degree candidates to waste years learning what ignorant,
half-educated, and Greekless medieval commentators had written. It disingenu-
ously extracted isolated passages from authors (including the Bible itself, the
Church Fathers, and modern writers). It then ignorantly or maliciously twisted
these passages into statements that had no relation to the intention of the author or
the historical and textual context in which those statements had been made. It
unfairly blackened the reputation of good Christians who had incurred the self-
interested wrath of ambitious academic politicians. And, as Erasmus bluntly wrote
in letters of 1525 to two of his most dangerous critics, Noel Beda of Paris and
Alberto Pio, prince of Carpi, scholastic theologians arrogantly sat back and issued
condemnations of articles extracted from the writings of Catholic defenders of the
faith, while they offered nothing of practical value to those who were struggling to
preserve a church that in Germany, at least, was collapsing over their heads.12

12Erasmus to Beda,June 15, 1525, ep. 1581, in Collected Works of Erasmus [henceforth CWE],
11:142-43, lines 350-79; Erasmus to Alberto Pio, October 10, 1525, ep. 1634, in CWE, 11:330-31,
lines 49-118 (line citations are given only for unusually long letters).

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432 Sixteenth CenturyJournal XXIX /2 (1998)

The point here is not whether either the scholastic attacks on the humanists or
the humanist denunciations of the scholastics were valid.What Rummel has led us
back to is awareness that the clashes between humanist and scholastic ways of
thinking had turned into an encounter between two rival cultures.True, humanism
as such was not a philosophy. True also, the great majority of humanist academics
accommodated themselves to the realities of a world controlled by senior profes-
sors. But at some much more profound level, the issues that divided humanists and
scholastics cut deeper than just personal feuds, competition for courses and offices
and income, or petty squabbling about the quality of someone's Latin style. In my
opinion, the issues cut even deeper than the disputes over reform of the liberal arts
curriculum.The conflicts studied by Overfield and others may have been localized,
personal, and muddled; but they reflect a disharmony that is fundamental. Conflict
was not accidental; it was fated, irrepressible. Laetitia Boehlm implied as much in an
essay published in 1976, and Rummel draws the line even more clearly, defining
the dispute over academic competency and "the exacerbation of the debate during
the Reformation" as the two forces that made the humanist-scholastic conflicts
fundamental rather than incidental.13
Future studies of this question need to pursue two major lines of inquiry. Both
have to do with intellectual method. The more difficult, but potentially the more
rewarding, is to focus on those aspects of humanism that challenged the whole
enterprise of rational philosophy, the scholastic aspiration toward attainment of
absolute truth. This involves humanism in its aspect as rhetoric. It calls for further
investigation of rhetorical thought, that art of persuasive argument which sought to
establish probable truths and questioned whether the human mind is capable of
attaining absolute certitude. There is already a substantial literature on this topic,
and we were urged long ago byJerrold Seigel and Hanna Gray to explore the cen-
tral role of rhetorical thought in shaping the identity and goals of humanism.14 This

13Laetitia Boehm, "Humanistische Bildungsbewegung und mittelalterliche Universitatsverfassung:

Aspekte zur frtihneuzeitlichen Reformgeschichte der deutschen Universitdten," in Jozef IJsewijn and
Jacques Paquet, eds., The Universities in the Late Middle Ages, Mediaevalia Lovaniensia, series 1, studia, 6
(Louvain: Leuven University Press, 1978), 315-46, and also inWaldemar Schlbgl and Peter Herde, eds.,
Grundwissenschaften und Geschichte: Festschriflftr Peter Acht, Miinchener Historische Studien, Abteilu
Geschichtliche Hilfswissenschaften, vol. 15 (Kallmiinz Opf:Verlag Michael Lassleben, 1976), 311-33;
Rummel, The Humanist-Scholastic Debate, 17-18. Referring principally to the intellectual situation in
Italian universities, Walter Riiegg, "Epilogue: The Rise of Humanism," in Hilde de Ridder-Symoens,
ed., A History of the University in Europe, vol. 1: Universities in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1992), 456-59, also points to an underlying disagreement concerning proper intellec-
tual method.
14Jerrold E. Seigel, Rhetoric and Philosophy in Renaissance Humanism: The Union of Eloquence and
Wisdom, Petrarch to Valla (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968); Hanna H. Gray, "Renaissance
Humanism:The Pursuit of Eloquence,"Journal of the History of Ideas 24 (1963): 497-514. For the general
history of rhetoric, see Thomas Conley, Rhetoric in the European Tradition (Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 1990);James J. Murphy, ed., Renaissance Eloquence: Studies in the Theory and Practice of Renais-
sance Rhetoric (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983);James J. Murphy, ed., Renaissance Rhetoric:
A Short-Title Catalogue of Works on RhetoricalTheoryfrom the Beginning of Printing toA.D. 1700 (NewYork:
Garland, 1981);Winifred Bryan Horner, ed., The Present State of Scholarship in Historical and Contemporary
Rhetoric (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1983); idem, ed., Historical Rhetoric: An Anno-
tated Bibliography of Selected Sources in English (Boston: G. D. Hall, 1980).

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 Nauert / Humanism as Method 433

is a hard path, leading through the Renaissance attacks on Aristotelian logic and
into the thickets of Ramist thought.15 This path also leads toward study of the
rebirth of philosophical skepticism, which has been given inadequate attention.
Although we have the fine essay of Alan Perreiah on this topic, and Richard Pop
kin's history of Renaissance skepticism,16 no one has adequately probed the persis
tent war of the humanists-that is, the great ones, such as Petrarch,Valla, Erasmu
andVives-on the fundamental assumptions of scholastic thought. Few humanists
directly raised the epistemological questions that scholastic philosophy failed to
address. Nevertheless, their emphasis on rhetorical argument and on the attainment
of moral rather than metaphysical certitude, together with their dismissive attitude
toward syllogistic argumentation, shows that under the surface there was a yawning
chasm between two antithetical conceptions of proper intellectual method.
Humanists did not just challenge the conclusions of their scholastic critics. They
denied the appropriateness of the questions being investigated and the validity of
the types of proof offered.The impression that humanists and scholastics were fail-
ing to communicate, were talking past one another, is correct: they were not
engaged in the same enterprise, did not pursue the same goals, and most assuredly
did not have compatible ideas about the proper use of human reason-that is,
about valid intellectual method. This methodological quarrel was precipitated by
the humanists' identity as rhetoricians, and it was constantly in play.
But there was another, humbler methodological issue, one that led more
directly to the bitter hostility of the humanist-scholastic debates. Rummel defines
this as an issue of professional competence, and she is right. But at bottom it is a
disagreement on method. It focuses on the second major humanist discipline,
grammar. Humanists were not only rhetoricians but also students of grammar, a
subject which through their work came to embrace study of ancient languages and
particularly the critical evaluation and reconstruction of ancient texts. Scholastic
philosophers and theologians spent long years acquiring the skills of dialectical
argumentation and familiarity with the opinions of the past authorities, both
ancient and medieval.When faced with publications by humanists who disagreed
with their opinions, their usual reaction was to reject the criticisms because the
authors were not professionally qualified by advanced degrees in the appropriate
higher faculty but were mere grammarians-that is, men who had mastered only
the most elementary of the seven liberal arts.This charge was to some extent justi-
fied in the case of Lefevre d'Etaples and Lorenzo Valla; it was not exactly true of
Erasmus, who did have a doctorate in theology, though a somewhat irregular one.
Nevertheless, the method that Erasmus followed in his biblical and patristic studies
was grammatical: likeValla and Lefevre, he focused attention on the critical evalu-

15Walter Ong, Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to theArt of Reason
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958; reprint ed., NewYork: Octagon, 1979).
16Alan Perreiah, "Humanistic Critiques of Scholastic Dialectic," Sixteenth Century Journal 13
(1982): 3-22; Richard H. Popkin, A History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Descartes (Assen:Van Gorcum,
1960); expanded edition:A History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza (Berkeley: University of Califor-
nia Press, 1979).

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434 Sixteenth CenturyJournal XXIX /2 (1998)

ation of ancient texts, including the New Testament, and challenged the adequacy
of the texts traditionally cited by scholastic thinkers, notably the Book of Sentences
and the Latin Vulgate Bible. Although occasionally Erasmus became irritated
enough by the pettifogging attacks of his critics to assert his right to be treated as a
qualified theologian,17 in general he conceded that his work as biblical and patristic
editor constituted only the humblest, most elementary level of theological scholar-
ship.18 That is, it dealt with the text. But as his scholastic critics quickly sensed, his
modest claim to control the text amounted to claiming control of the whole field.
Scholastic methodology contained a number of vulnerable spots, and human-
ists identified and attacked many of them. In some ways the most intellectually per-
verse was the process of extracting isolated statements from a text and then treating
those sentences as accurate reflections of the author's opinion, without attention to
what the sentence implied in its original context. The humanists' criticism of the
theologians' reliance on anthologies such as Peter Lombard's Book of Sentences was
a protest against this shoddy intellectual procedure.They demanded a shift of focus
in theological training from medieval anthologies and commentaries to intensive
study of the biblical text itself. The issue arose starkly in Erasmus' controversial
exchange with the Louvain theologian Jacobus Latomus, who flatly denied that
under modern conditions study of the text of scripture should be the first or the
principal focus of theological education.19 Indeed, one of the ablest of the Paris
doctors, the Scottish theologian John Mair, who had previously defended the tra-
ditional focus on medieval commentators and anthologies, admitted in 1523, in the
face of the Protestant challenge, that his fellow theologians had been forced to give
up speculative theological issues and to get back to work on the Bible.20
A more immediately pressing issue, however, was the kind of textual criticism
represented by the biblical scholarship of Lefevre and Erasmus, especially by Eras-
mus' Novum Instrumentum. This publication, which first appeared in 1516, included
not only the Greek text of the New Testament but also an extended set of notes
critically evaluating vulnerable passages in the traditional Latin text. Its revised
second edition of 1519 added a new Latin translation based on the Greek text and
the critical notes.Already before the first edition appeared in 1516, the young Lou-
vain theologian Martin van Dorp had urged Erasmus to abandon the project.21 He
feared that such a publication inevitably challenged the authority of the church,
which had based its teaching on the traditionalVulgate text for a thousand years. In
an even stronger letter, he explicitly challenged the right of people who used gram-
matical arguments and lacked theological training to intrude into the interpretation
of the Bible and hence ultimately into the determination of doctrinal issues.22 He
denied Erasmus' contention that a competent theologian must be able to consult

17Erasmus to Noel Beda,June 15, 1525, ep. 1581, in CWE, 11:131, lines 21-27.
18Ibid., ep. 1581, in CWE, 1 1: 135, lines 134-39.
19Jacobus Latomus, De trium linguarum et studii theologici ratione dialogus (Antwerp: Michael Hille-
nius, 1519), fols. B3v, C2r.
20Farge, Orthodoxy and Reform, 13-14, 179-80.
21Dorp to Erasmus, September 1514, ep. 304, in CWE, 3:17-23.
22Dorp to ErasmusAugust 27, 1515, ep. 347, in CWE, 3:154-67, esp. 160, 162-65.

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 Nauert / Humanism as Method 435

the original Hebrew and Greek texts. He explicitly upheld the value of the tradi-
tional scholastic commentaries and doctors for the education of theologians. He
even raised the somewhat silly and wholly undocumented suggestion that since the
Greeks had subsequently fallen away from the Roman church, they may well have
deliberately corrupted the Greek Bible. Erasmus' one surviving reply to Dorp at
this period not only defends his effort to reconstruct and retranslate the text of the
New Testament but bluntly ridicules the inability of the older theologians to com-
prehend the principles underlying his work.23 Dorp himself had studied and taught
humanist texts before he turned to the study of theology. Admonished by a second
letter from Erasmus (now lost) and above all by a brilliant letter from Erasmus'
friend Thomas More, Dorp drew back. In 1517 he presented a university lecture
which openly endorsed not only the textual and philological approach to the Bible
but also the humanists' criticism of the traditional theological curriculum.Although
Dorp's senior colleagues punished him by withdrawing for a year his right to lecture
on theology, he published his defense of Erasmian theology in 1520.24
Anyone who has ever wondered at the meteoric rise ofThomas More to the
top of the English legal profession and then to high public office should read
More's letter of October 21, 1515, to Dorp.25 It goes right to the central issues. It
redefines the foundation of grammatical science in the humanist way, as something
based on usage instead of logic. Then it attacks the scholastics' misapplication of
dialectic, their narrowness and lack of general culture, and their uselessness for the
practical tasks of preaching the gospel and refuting heretics. Most shrewdly of all,
More charges that it is not the humanist grammarians with their philological crit-
icism of biblical and patristic texts who are undermining and distorting the true
sense of scripture, but rather the arrogant dialecticians. They know little beyond
scholastic commentaries and the excerpts in the Book of Sentences, but they apply
their sophistical dialectic to twist and distort the sacred text. For More, as for Eras-
mus himself, a humanist who criticizes and revises a biblical passage is not subject-
ing revealed truth to the rules of human grammar-as scholastic critics had
charged-but is using linguistic and textual methods to get at the meaning origi-
nally placed there by the sacred author. It is the dialecticians, the scholastic theolo-
gians, who are subjecting the sacred text to human fancy. No author I have read,
not even Erasmus or the subtle Juan Luis Vives, laid out more starkly the issues on
which humanist scholars and scholastic theologians were at loggerheads.The con-
version of Dorp to the Erasmian side did not, of course, end the conflict.Jacobus
Latomus in 1519 reasserted the scholastic case by attacking the humanists' demand
that all theologians should be able to use the Greek and Hebrew texts of the
Bible,26 and others followed his example.

23Erasmus to Dorp, 1515, ep. 337, in CWE, 3:111-39.

24Dorp, De laudibus Pauli, de literis sacris ediscendis... (Basel: Froben, 1520).
25More to Dorp, in The Complete Works of Thomas More, vol. 15, ed. Daniel Kinney (New Haven
Yale University Press, 1986): 2-127 (Latin text and English trans. on facing pages).
26Latomus, De trium linguarum; on this and other controversies involving Erasmus, see Erika
Rummel, Erasmus and His Catholic Critics, 2 vols., Bibliotheca Humanistica et Reformatorica, 45 (Nieu-
wkoop: De Graaf, 1989).

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436 Sixteenth CenturyJournal XXIX /2 (1998)

The modest humanist claim to analyze and establish the authoritative texts as
a first step in theological discourse was, in fact, a claim for prior control of inter-
pretation. One of the vulnerable points in the monopoly exercised by all three of
the higher faculties-law and medicine as well as theology-was that all three fields
depended on some authoritative text handed down from ancient times: the Bible
for theology, of course, the Corpus iuris civilis for civil law, and the ancient Greek
physicians Hippocrates and Galen for medicine.The special competence claimed
by all three professions involved the interpretation and application of the ancient
text to modern needs, a procedure which by the sixteenth century had produced a
vast body of scholastic commentaries, treatises, and handbooks.The humanists dis-
missed this medieval learning as worthless trash, the product of a barbarous and
incompetent age, an incompetence symbolized by the inability of the scholastic
doctors to consult the original Greek and Hebrew texts.
Humanists now wanted to intervene at the very outset of the interpretive pro-
cess by insisting, as grammarians, that the grammarian-the humanist expert on
languages and on the reconstruction of texts-had to establish the text itself and
explain to those who could not read the original what the words really meant.
Only then, even if one conceded the appropriateness of applying dialectical
method to a revealed text, could any more sophisticated explication begin. Thus
despite their apparently modest claim, the humanists were demanding the first cut,
authority over the text itself, over the literal meaning of its words, and even over
the range of possible meanings that those inspired words could have had for the
ancient author. As Jerry Bentley makes clear in his discussion of Erasmus' critical
work on the text of the New Testament, this meant quite literally that the humanist
editor decided what was in and what was out. The most extreme case involved
Erasmus' decision that since none of his Greek manuscripts contained the comma
Johanneum at 1 John 5:7, the one clear and unmistakable biblical witness to the doc-
trine of the Trinity, he must omit that passage from his edition. Although he
affirmed his own loyalty to Trinitarian orthodoxy and noted that SaintJerome him-
self believed that Latin scribes had inserted the passage to provide scriptural support
against the Arians, his act of omission stirred up charges that he was an Arian her-
etic.27 Actually, Erasmus was in no way attacking the Trinitarian doctrine. But he
was telling theologians that in their defense of Trinitarian orthodoxy, they could
not cite this helpful text, because it did not exist. They did not like this, nor did
they like the other textual emendations or retranslations that affected their freedom
to draw proof-texts from the traditional Vulgate Bible. In his counterblast against
Petrus Mosellanus and Erasmus in 1519,Jacobus Latomus seemed totally unable to
conceive how theology, a subject based on authoritative texts, might differ from
manual arts like shoemaking or painting, whose modern practitioners clearly had
no need to rely on some ancient Greek-language text on their subject.28Latomus
maintained that the truth of scripture exists objectively and externally to the text

27Jerry H. Bentley, Humanists and Holy Writ: New Testament Scholarship in the Renaissance (Prince-
ton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 152.
28Latomus, De trium linguarum, fol.A4v.

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 Nauert / Humanism as Method 437

and does not inhere in the words of scripture; indeed, that those who already pos-
sess true doctrine do not need scripture at all, still less need the ability to read it in
the original languages.29 As for patristic texts, Latomus insists that they must be
read reverently and in accord with dogmatic truth, "even (so to speak) contrary to
what the words say."30 It is also clear that Latomus totally lacked the concept of an
original text, an urtext, which a competent editor can closely approximate by
drawing on multiple witnesses even if none of the existing manuscripts is free from
corruption. He presented a pettifogging criticism of the arguments advanced in
defense of Erasmus' program of biblical humanism, while also presenting a far more
plausible case for the continuing value of the long scholastic tradition of exegesis.
But when he faced the central issues of textual authority and philological criticism,
he was simply lost. Between him and Erasmus there was exchange of treatises but
no real discourse.They functioned in two quite different cultural worlds-exactly
the point I want to establish here.
Theology was the hot and dangerous field, of course. Even before the Refor-
mation it touched on issues of religious belief; and the scholastic doctors even
before Luther were quite ready to insinuate or openly charge that humanist schol-
arship on biblical or patristic texts was heretical. But although the two other pro-
fessional fields never produced equally noxious conflicts, humanist textual
scholarship challenged them also, precisely because they also relied on the authority
of ancient texts. In law, humanist scholars attacked the vast body of glosses and
commentaries produced by medieval professors of law. Inspired by the work of
Angelo Poliziano and Guillaume Bude on ancient legal texts, Andrea Alciato estab-
lished a whole new approach to the teaching of Roman law. His teaching, first at
the papal university in Avignon and then at Bourges, turned away from the tradi-
tional Italian method (mos italicus) of teaching the opinions of the medieval legal
scholars. Instead, he concentrated his efforts on the philological analysis of the
ancient text itself.31 This new approach, known as mos gallicus because it became
dominant in French law faculties, did not win the upper hand very far beyond the
borders of France; but it did represent another humanist challenge to the prevailing
university tradition, once again based on the philologist's special ability to probe
beneath the surface of an authoritative ancient text.

29Ibid., fols. B3v, C2r.

30Ibid., fol. D2v: "reverentius et quamque cum sermonis improprietate (ut sic loquar)."
31Donald Kelley, Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship: Language, Law, and History in the
*French Renaissance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970), 96. On the importance of Alciato's
teaching and the rise of the new mos gallicus in legal education, see also Guido Kisch, Humanismus und
Jurisprudenz: Der Kampf zwischen mos italicus und mos gallicus an der Universitdt Basel (Basel: Helbing und
Lichtenhahn, 1955; Myron P. Gilmore, Humanists andJurists: Six Studies in the Renaissance (Cambridge,
MA.: Harvard University Press, 1963), 32-33; Steven Rowan, Ulrich Zasius (Frankfurt a.M.:Vittorio
Klostermann, 1987), 206-9. On humanism in both legal and medical education, see also August Buck,
"Die Rezeption des Humanismus in den juristischen und medizinischen Fakultaten," in Guldolf Keil,
Bernd Moeller, and Winfried Trusen, eds., Der Humanismus und die oberen Fakultdten, Deutsche For-
schungsgemeinschaft, Kommission fuir Humnanismusforschung, Mitteilung XIV (Weinheim: Humani-
ora,VCH, 1987), 267-84.

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438 Sixteenth CenturyJournal XXIX /2 (1998)

Medical science, too, rested on ancient texts which humanist philologists

claimed the right to edit, translate, and interpret. Humanists claimed an ability to
restore ancient medicine while purging it of the barbarous influences of the inter-
vening centuries. At the end of the fifteenth century, Niccolo Leoniceno, professor
of medicine at the University of Ferrara, was hailed as "the restorer of ancient med-
icine"; as a well-trained Hellenist he produced new translations of the Aphorisms of
Hippocrates and several of Galen's treatises as well as scientific works of Aristotle
and Ptolemy. He also agitated for the purging of "barbarian" texts-that is, Arabic
medical works-from the medical curriculum.32 Humanists with medical educa-
tion produced the first Greek editions ofAristotle (1495-99) and Galen (1525) for
the Aldine press ofVenice. Although medical controversy was not so sharp as that
in law and especially theology, the humanist method of philological criticism also
affected this third of the three professional faculties of the universities-and it did
so largely through its claim to determine questions of textual authenticity and
meaning.
Thus Renaissance humanism penetrated not only the liberal arts but also the
three higher faculties which were theoretically beyond the professional compe-
tence of its practitioners. Conflict was the almost inevitable result. Humanism did
not destroy scholasticism. It did not even try. But both its rhetorical challenge to
the value of dialectic and its grammarians' claim to determine the wording and
meaning of authoritative texts did pose a serious challenge to the older academic
culture by pointing to vulnerable spots in the medieval intellectual tradition. In the
long run, this humanistic philological and textual method grew into the rather
bloodless field of classical philology, but in a deeper sense it also caused more pro-
found and unsettling cultural changes, such as the rise of modern legal history, the
discovery of the documentary sources of medieval history, and the potentially rev-
olutionary method of historical investigation which subjected all ideas and institu-
tions to the cold light of document-based historical criticism.33

32Heinrich Schipperges, Ideologie und Historiographie des Arabismus, Sudhoffi Archiv fuir Geschichte
der Medizin und der Naturwissenschaften, Beiheft 1 (Wiesbaden, 1961), 14-26; Buck, "Rezeption,"
especially pp. 267, 276, 279-80. On the importance of the 1525 Greek edition of Galen, see Gerhard
Baader, "Die Antikerezeption in der Entwicklung der medizinischenWissenschaft wdhrend der Renais-
sance," in Rudolf Schmitz and Gustav Keil, eds., Humanismus und Medizin (Weinheim, 1984), 61, and
Nikolaus Mani, "Die griechische Editio princeps des Galenos (1525), ihre Entstehung und ihre Wir-
kung," Gesnerus 13 (1956): 39. Also Nancy G. Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine:An Intro-
duction to Knowledge and Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 58, 70-72, 190.
330n the broader lines of intellectual challenge to scholastic learning that developed out of the
humanist method in the later sixteenth century, mainly in the application of critical philology in direc-
tions leading toward modern classical philology, legal history, discovery of the documentary sources of
medieval history, and general historical method, see Donald Kelley, Foundations; George Huppert, The
Idea of Perfect History: Historical Erudition and Historical Philosophy in Renaissance France (Urbana: Univer-
sity of Illinois Press, 1970);Anthony Graftonjoseph Scaliger:A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship,
2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983-95); and Anthony Grafton, Defenders of the Text: The Tradition of Schol-
arship in an Age of Science, 1450-1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).

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