Reformation

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Erasmus and Christian Humanist Latin

Eric MacPhail

To cite this article: Eric MacPhail (2017) Erasmus and Christian Humanist Latin, Reformation,
22:2, 67-81, DOI: 10.1080/13574175.2017.1387966

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 reformation, Vol. 22 No. 2, November, 2017, 67–81

Erasmus and Christian Humanist Latin

Eric MacPhail
Indiana University, USA

This essay looks at the quarrel of Ciceronianism among European Renaissance

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humanists from the perspective of Erasmus’s biblical scholarship and his

evangelical understanding of the proper relationship between the mind and
the speech of a Christian. These issues emerge from a contextual reading of
his Dialogus Ciceronianus of 1528 that relies not only on the history of Renais-
sance debates over imitation but also and primarily on Erasmus’s understand-
ing of human and divine logos as developed in his Lingua and particularly in the
Paraphrases on the New Testament. Our reading will focus on some key meta-
phors that circulate among these Erasmian texts including the metaphor of the
mirror and its implications for Christian identity.

keywords Erasmus, Ciceronianism, mirror, decorum

Already in 1511 Erasmus had conceived of the nucleus of his satirical dialogue
Ciceronianus, as we can see from a passage in the Praise of Folly on characteristic
national vices. Each nation has its own typical brand of philautia or self-love,
declares Moria or Folly proudly: the British pride themselves on their music and
their opulent meals, the Scots on their nobility and their dialectical skill, and the
French on their manners, while Parisians claim preeminence in theology. And the Ita-
lians? They claim literature and eloquence as their exclusive preserve and consider
themselves alone among mortals to be exempt from the epithet “barbarian” (ASD
IV-3:128; CWE 27:117).1 This still lighthearted allusion to Italian cultural chauvin-
ism would grow in time to a bitter grudge that came to full expression in the Dialo-
gus Ciceronianus on the best style of prose, published with Johann Froben in Basel in
1528, a year after the sack of Rome had administered a stern lesson in humility to
Italian and Roman self-pride. Erasmus’s correspondence from the years immediately
preceding the publication of the dialogue testifies to the elaboration of this appar-
ently minor concern of the Praise of Folly into a major apologetic and satiric preoc-
cupation of Erasmus’s life and writings as he responded forcefully to accusations of
barbarity leveled against himself and northern humanists in general, with one galling

1
ASD designates Opera omnia Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami. In progress. (Amsterdam, 1969--). References are to ordo,
volume, and page number. CWE stands for Collected Works of Erasmus. In progress. (Toronto, 1974--). References are
to volume and page number.

© The Tyndale Society 2017 DOI 10.1080/13574175.2017.1387966

 68 ERIC MACPHAIL

Gallic exception, for their apostasy from Ciceronianism or the exclusive imitation of
Ciceronian style. Recognizing the role of Latin style as the basis of collective identity
among learned men, Erasmus challenged Ciceronianism as a spiritual and verbal
orthodoxy that threatened his own identity as a Christian humanist. To make this
challenge, Erasmus appealed to the ethic of speech which he had elaborated in his
own biblical scholarship and particularly in his interpretation of the Gospel of
John. To the Ciceronian ideal of imitation he opposed an evangelical standard of
decorum based on the identity of speaker and speech in the divine logos.2
Ciceronianism has an ancient as well as an early modern history, and the earlier
phase can help to illuminate the ideological stakes of the later phase culminating
in Erasmus’s dialogue. If we were to identify the first Ciceronian, we might nominate
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Marcus Annaeus Seneca or Seneca Rhetor, who dedicated his first book of Contro-
versies to his own sons in a prefatory discourse that lays bare most of the anxieties of
the nascent cult of Cicero. Writing in the reign of emperor Tiberius, Seneca congra-
tulates his sons for studying both ancient and modern eloquence, that is to say the
orators of the Republic as well as those of the early empire. First of all, he
remarks sagely, there is no unique model, however good it may be, to be imitated,
since the imitator is never equal to the author: “Non est unus, quamvis praecipuus
sit, imitandus, quia numquam par fit imitator auctori” (Controv. 1 pref. 6). This is a
handy synthesis of what will become in the Renaissance the anti-Ciceronian pos-
ition, sometimes identified as eclecticism. Secondly, and now we hear the true
voice of Ciceronianism, eloquence is in decline and talent decreases daily, for what-
ever Roman eloquence has that can be opposed to or preferred to insolent Greece
flourished circa Ciceronem, around Cicero, who occupies the center of Rome’s cul-
tural identity:

Deinde ut possitis aestimare, in quantum cotidie ingenia decrescant et nescio qua iniqui-
tate naturae eloquentia se retro tulerit: quidquid Romana facundia habet quod insolenti
Graeciae aut opponat aut praeferat circa Ciceronem effloruit. (Controv. 1 pref. 6)

From this preface we may deduce that Ciceronianism involves a sort of historical
pessimism and lack of confidence in the future. Moreover, long before it became
the expression of aggressive cultural chauvinism in Renaissance Italy, Ciceronianism
was a response to cultural chauvinism on the part of Romans intimidated by the
prestige of Greek learning. The epithet “insolent Greece” would reverberate down
through the ages until a wave of Byzantine émigrés provoked a renewed clash of cul-
tures in Renaissance Italy.3
2
John Monfasani treats many of the issues raised here in his chapter “Renaissance Ciceronianism and Christianity” in
Humanisme et église en Italie et en France méridionale (XVe siècle – milieu du XVIe siècle), ed. Patrick Gilli (Rome,
2004), 361-79, in which he seeks to vindicate Ciceronianism against Erasmus’s criticism. Monfasani is very sensitive
to Erasmus’s inconsistencies and contradictions, and he insists that, despite Erasmian resistance, “Ciceronianism
thrived for the whole of the Renaissance” (371). Without reassessing Erasmus’s influence, this essay seeks to recover
the internal consistency of Erasmus’s position. More fundamentally, John D’Amico, Renaissance Humanism in Papal
Rome. Humanists and Churchmen on the Eve of the Reformation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983)
recognizes that, for Erasmus and his adversaries, “language and religion were bound together” (141). D’Amico
defines this bond for Roman humanists, and I propose to do so for Erasmus.
3
One witness to this tradition is Ravisius Textor’s collection of epithets, first published in 1518, which lists eleven
epithets for Greece, culminating in Insolens, illustrated by the quotation from Seneca Rhetor. See Ioannis Ravisii Textoris
Epithetorum Opus Absolutissimum (Basel, 1555), 378.
 ERASMUS AND CHRISTIAN HUMANIST LATIN 69

The defensive posture taken by Seneca Rhetor in the preface to the first book of
Controversiae is Ciceronian in the additional sense that Cicero anticipated this atti-
tude in his own philosophical treatises where he deplores the Greek bias of his Latin
audience. The hardest people to please, he declares at the outset of the De finibus,
are Romans who think that all philosophy should be written in Greek. He never
ceases to be amazed at this insolent distaste for native writing: “Ego autem mirari
satis non queo unde hoc sit tam insolens domesticarum rerum fastidium” (De
finibus 1.10). Now the epithet insolens is reserved for would-be Greeks who look
down on their own native language. Cicero is convinced not only that the Latin
language is not poor, as is commonly thought, but also that it is richer even than
Greek: “Latinam linguam non modo non inopem, ut vulgo putarent, sed locuple-
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tiorem etiam esse quam Graecam” (De finibus 1.10). To prefer Latin to Greek in
the Hellenistic world is a self-conscious paradox, as if to prefer poverty to wealth,
and Cicero here plays the role of the sophist who makes the weaker argument stron-
ger. Moreover, Cicero’s declaration recognizes that identity is based on language, but
language is not the same as nationality. Linguistic bias can be imported or even worn
like a disguise. Ciceronianism, the ideology named after Cicero, will convey the inex-
tricable confusion of language and identity to the Renaissance.
The Ciceronian controversy revives in the fifteenth century, not initially as a
quarrel over the best style of Latin prose, but rather as the last gasp of Greek
hubris in a changing world. In 1457, four years after the fall of Constantinople to
the Turks, the Byzantine émigré John Argyropoulos began his professorship in Flor-
ence, where he lectured on Aristotle and ancient philosophy.4 In the course of his lec-
tures, he had the temerity to insist that Cicero was ignorant not only of philosophy
but also of the Greek language. As exhibit A of his indictment, Argyropoulos alleged
the passage from the Tusculan Disputations where Cicero reports Aristotle’s defi-
nition of the soul as ἐνδελέχεια in the sense of perpetual motion (Tusculan Disputa-
tions 1.22), rather than ἐντελέχεια in the sense of the perfection of the living body as
recorded in Aristotle’s extant works (De anima 412a27), thereby betraying, accord-
ing to Argyropoulos, an ignorance of Aristotelian doctrine and a confusion of phi-
losophical terminology.5 Based on testimony from the correspondence of Francesco
Filelfo, Giuseppe Cammelli dates this indiscretion to the first four years of Argyro-
poulos’s residence in Florence, from 1457 to 1461,6 so our principal witness of this
episode, Angelo Poliziano’s Miscellaneorum centuria prima of 1489, must be a
belated and second-hand account, though it still offers a paradigmatic expression
of Ciceronianism. Poliziano wrote the first chapter of his Miscellanea in defense
of Cicero and the Latins, complaining that ista natio, the Greeks, do not readily
admit us, that is the Latins, to participate in their language and learning.7 So

4
For a compact account of Argyropoulos’ career and thought, see John Monfasani, Greeks and Latins in Renaissance
Italy (Ashgate, 2004), ch. 2 “The Averroism of John Argyropoulos.”
5
In the absence of any transcript of this lecture, we rely on the testimony of Angelo Poliziano’s Miscellaneorum Centuria
Prima, cited below.
6
Giuseppe Cammelli, I Dotti Bizantini et le origini dell’umanesimo vol. 2 Giovanni Argiropulo (Florence: Le Monnier,
1941), 177. For the most recent account of this quarrel, see Han Lamers, Greece Reinvented. Transformations of Byzan-
tine Hellenism in Renaissance Italy (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 185-87.
7
Angelo Poliziano, Omnia opera (Venice, 1498; reprint Rome, 1968), B ii v°: “Vix enim dici potest, quam nos aliquando
idest latinos homines, in participatum suae linguae, doctrinaeque, non libenter admittat ista natio.”
 70 ERIC MACPHAIL

Poliziano’s Ciceronianism is a sort of counter-nationalism provoked by a prior, deca-

dent brand of nationalism. This is the paradigm that will prevail in the sixteenth
century with a redistribution of roles: when insolent Greece yields to insolent
Italy, counter-nationalism moves north across the Alps.
While Cicero’s status as the patron of Latin eloquence, or “latinae copiae genitor
et princeps” in Poliziano’s formulation, remained inviolable, his suitability as the
unique model of Latin prose was subject to debate.8 Poliziano himself intervened
in this debate in favor of eclectic imitation and against Ciceronianism in the
narrow sense of exclusive imitation of Cicero. Before his death in 1494, Poliziano
prepared his correspondence for publication in twelve books, and he placed at the
end of book eight his exchange of letters with Paolo Cortesi on imitation. Both
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authors shared a common identity as Latin humanists, but they disagreed about
style. In an undated letter thought to be from the 1480s,9 Poliziano regrets to
inform his correspondent that he was unimpressed by the latter’s epistolary elo-
quence, which he sampled at Cortesi’s own invitation. Poliziano does not share
the other man’s evident conviction that we must reproduce Cicero’s traits, his line-
amenta, in our own Latin composition. Rather than seek to ape or to parrot
another’s style, Poliziano thinks, we should strive to express ourselves, but only
after long study, when we are finally ready to trust to our own forces or, as the
saying goes, to swim without cork.10 We can run faster when we’re not following
in another’s footsteps. This sententious advice, borrowed from classical models,
made such an impression on Erasmus that he couldn’t help imitating it in his own
dialogue.
In answer, Cortesi disclaims any superstitious devotion to Cicero but does insist
on the necessity of imitation, and for the same reason given by Seneca Rhetor. Elo-
quence is in decline and you cannot speak well unless you choose a model to imitate,
just as foreigners who do not speak the language cannot traverse alien territory
without a native guide:

cum viderem eloquentiae studia tamdiu deserta iacuisse … et quasi nativam quandam
vocem deesse hominibus nostris, me saepe palam affirmasse nihil his temporibus
ornate varieque dici posse, nisi ab iis qui aliquem sibi praeponerent ad imitandum,
cum et peregrini expertes sermonis alienas regiones male possint sine duce peragrare.
(Garin 906)

By this logic, the Latins have become, through the lapse of time, foreigners in their
own land, in need of a guide in the modern sense of Cicerone. Ciceronianism is thus
8
A debate chronicled by Remigio Sabbadini, Storia del Ciceronianismo (Turin, 1885) and Izora Scott, Controversies
Over the Imitation of Cicero in the Renaissance (Davis, CA: Hermagoras Press, 1991). For a more recent synopsis,
see John Monfasani, “The Ciceronian Controversy,” in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism. The Renaissance
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 395-401. Jean-Claude Margolin offers a compact summary both of the
quarrel and its modern interpretations in “L’apogée de la rhétorique humaniste (1500-1536),” in Histoire de la rhétor-
ique dans l’Europe moderne. 1450-1950, ed. Marc Fumaroli (Paris: PUF, 1999), 191-257 (226-35).
9
Scott, Controversies Over the Imitation of Cicero, 19n.13. Martin McLaughlin, Literary Imitation in the Italian
Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 202 dates it more precisely to 1485.
10
“Sed cum Ciceronem, cum bonos alios multum diuque legeris … tum demum velim quod dicitur sine cortice nates,
atque ipse tibi sis aliquando in consilio” in Eugenio Garin, Prosatori Latini del Quattrocento (Milan: Ricciardi,
1952), 904. Hereafter cited as Garin, followed by page number. Erasmus remembers this saying as adage 742 Sine
cortice nabis (ASD II-2:262).
 ERASMUS AND CHRISTIAN HUMANIST LATIN 71

an admission of estrangement or alienation from an original identity. Cortesi’s

stance is hardly chauvinistic; it is rather elegiac. The ancients knew the proper
method of imitation, he adds, but that knowledge has been lost.
Responding to Poliziano’s provocation, Cortesi assures him that he does not want
to resemble his model as an ape does a man but rather as the son resembles his father,
“ut filium parentis” (Garin 906). Erasmus will remember this formula all the more
so since Cortesi singles out Cicero as the “fons perennis” (Garin 908) or perennial
source of Latin eloquence. In the Ciceronianus, Erasmus will reassign this role of
fons to the heart or mind or innermost self of the speaker, whose speech is like a
river flowing from the source, “ut amnis e fonte promanans” (ASD I-2:704; CWE
28:442). Finally, Cortesi cannot admit Poliziano’s ideal of independent self-
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expression, since the writer who goes out of the beaten path, or “de praescripto
egredi” (Garin 904) in Poliziano’s terms, ends up like one who wanders aimlessly,
“qui temere vagetur” (Garin 910), thereby reminding us of the travelers traversing
a foreign land without a guide. The Poliziano-Cortesi correspondence, first pub-
lished in the 1498 Politiani opera omnia, sets the terms, especially the figurative
terms, for the discussion of imitation in Erasmus’s later dialogue.
Yet Cortesi’s interpretation of Ciceronianism is strangely inoffensive and tenta-
tive. We need Cicero because we are lost. This is not at all the attitude proclaimed
by those Ciceronians with whom Erasmus came in direct conflict in the course of
his career, especially in the 1520s as he was simultaneously embroiled in his contro-
versy with Martin Luther.11 We hear the first rumors of this clash between Erasmus
and his Ciceronian adversaries in his correspondence from August 1524, when he
answers a letter from Haio Herman reporting criticisms of Erasmus’s style among
the Roman humanists.12 Of his critics, who were liberal with the epithet barbarus,
Erasmus says, “Oderunt Christi nomen: quod nostra barbaries utinam perinde syn-
ceriter ac vehementer amplecteretur!”13 A year later, in August 1525, an English cor-
respondent in Padua reports on the stylistic tyranny of Ciceronianism and warns
that the new edition of Christophe de Longueil’s letters contains some criticisms
of Erasmus.14 In a letter from May 1526, after some perfunctory condolences for
the untimely death of Longueil, Erasmus confides to Andrea Alciati that a new
sect has arisen of Ciceronians, who seem no less active in Italy than the Lutherans
are in the North (as if both were threats to Christian unity). For the first time, but
not the last, he predicts that, if Cicero were to come back to life, he would mock
this new gang of Ciceronians.15 Then in June he receives an important update
from a Flemish scholar then residing in Italy, Leonard Casembroot. Casembroot

11
For an introduction to this controversy, see the anthology Erasmus and Luther: The Battle over Free Will, ed. Clarence
Miller (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2012).
12
For a case study of Roman humanism emphasizing the social rather than stylistic basis of collective identity, see
Kenneth Gouwens, “Ciceronianism and collective identity: defining the boundaries of the Roman Academy, 1525,”
Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 23 (1993), 173-95.
13
Epistle 1479, lines 120-22. Cited from Opus epistolarum Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami, ed. P. S. Allen et al. 12 vols.
(Oxford, 1906-1958). References are to letter and line number.
14
Epistle 1595, lines 129-34. For Longueil (1488-1522), see Allen’s preface to epistle 914, the letter which initiated
Longueil’s acquaintance with Erasmus.
15
Epistle 1706, lines 37-44. Erasmus returns to the Ciceronian-Lutheran analogy in two letters addressed to Viglius Zui-
chemus: epistle 2604, lines 23-25 and epistle 2682, lines 10-13.
 72 ERIC MACPHAIL

has heard from Froben that Erasmus is planning to reveal to the world the philautia
of certain Italians who will not grant anyone besides Cicero a reputation for speak-
ing.16 Moreover, this opinion has turned many famous men against Erasmus,
especially Lazzaro Bonamico, that new Aristarchus, not to say Erasmiomastix.17
This letter is not only a sort of advance notice of the Ciceronianus, with a reminis-
cence of the passage from the Praise of Folly on philautia cited above, but also a
reminder of the evolution of the controversy since the fifteenth century. Poliziano
in the Miscellanea called Argyropoulos Ciceromastix (B iii v°) for attacking
Cicero and defaming the Latins, who rise up boldly to defend their champion.
Now Erasmus’s partisan, a fellow northerner who styles himself Flandrus, calls
the Ciceronian Lazzaro Bonamico Erasmiomastix for defaming Erasmus, the cham-
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pion of the non-Italians or the transalpine humanists (whose common language is

still Latin). In effect, just as Greek cultural chauvinism provoked the counter-
reaction of Ciceronianism among the Latins, now Ciceronianism calls forth Eras-
mianism as a counter-ideology with its own partisans.
This dynamic is clearly on display in a letter of March 1527 written from Spain by
Pedro Juan Olivar under very particular circumstances. Olivar reports on the early
phase of the Conference of Valladolid, which was convened by the Spanish Inquisi-
tion in order to deliberate on suspect passages in Erasmus’s work and to determine
whether his books should be banned in Spain.18 Olivar reports dismissively that
there are twenty-one articles brought against Erasmus by the Spanish friars, and
he outlines the principal actors in this tragoedia, especially the faithful Erasmians.
Then, without transition, he passes on to certain Italian expatriates in Spain who cri-
ticize Erasmus’s style and call him a barbarian.19 They prefer the Neapolitan huma-
nist Giovanni Pontano to Erasmus and, please God, consider Christophe de
Longueil to be the most eloquent of all the northerners, “omnium Transmonta-
norum eloquentissimus.”20 Olivar trusts that this news will not deter Erasmus
from persevering in the service of Christian philosophy. Olivar is a valuable infor-
mant on the many jealousies and rivalries that contributed to the Ciceronianus.
More importantly, his letter confirms the seamless connection, at this stage of Euro-
pean history and of Erasmus’s career, between religious orthodoxy and stylistic
orthodoxy. The Spanish monks and clerics challenge Erasmus’s Catholic orthodoxy
while the expatriate Italians (Castiglione, Navagero, and Tagliacarne are the three
named in the letter) challenge his Ciceronian orthodoxy. For one group, he is here-
ticus while for the other barbarus. Clearly Ciceronianism has something to do with
the authoritarian Catholic reaction to dissent, which has a lot to do with anxiety
over Lutheranism. Erasmus repudiated Luther but would not make common
cause with the guardians of Catholic orthodoxy. He preferred a similar non-
conformism in matters of style. Erasmus’s independent stance appeals to his

16
Epistle 1720, lines 48-51.
17
Epistle 1720, line 54. Bonamico apparently did not live up to this invidious epithet, as may be inferred from Erasmus’
correspondence. See the entry on him in Contemporaries of Erasmus, vol.1 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985),
166.
18
For more details, see Marcel Bataillon, Érasme et l’Espagne (Geneva: Droz, 1998), ch. 5.
19
Epistle 1791, lines 37-43.
20
Epistle 1791, line 60.
 ERASMUS AND CHRISTIAN HUMANIST LATIN 73

correspondent as an instance of “philosophia Christiana,”21 which naturally

suggests Erasmus’s philosophia Christi or philosophy of Christ, but which I
would translate here as Christian humanism, to distinguish it both from scholasti-
cism and from Ciceronianism. His means of expression is therefore Christian huma-
nist Latin, which is neither scholastic Latin nor Ciceronian Latin, but an
intermediary style that Bulephorus, one of Erasmus’s interlocutors in the Ciceronia-
nus, will call “medium quiddam inter Scotos et Ciceronis simias” (ASD I-2:642;
CWE 28:390), thereby echoing Poliziano’s scornful usage of simia to designate
the slavish imitator (Garin 902).
In October 1527, when the Conference of Valladolid had already disbanded
without reaching a verdict, Erasmus wrote to a young Spanish Hellenist named
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Francisco de Vergara a long letter containing, in the words of Pierre Mesnard,

“un schéma complet de ce qui va devenir le Ciceronianus” (ASD I-2:583).
Erasmus portrays himself here as an aging gladiator eager to retire from combat
but condemned to die in the arena. Once he fought the scholastics on behalf of
humane letters, but now a new type of enemy has come out of hiding. These
enemies would banish the name of Christ from all good literature, as if nothing
could be elegant that was not pagan. They praise Pontano to the skies (we know
who they are from Olivar’s letter)22 and cannot endure Augustine or Jerome. For
his part, Erasmus prefers one Christian ode to a boatload of Pontano’s verses,
however elegant and erudite they may be. Such people think it is more shameful
not to be Ciceronian than not to be Christian, and this hubris marks an estrange-
ment from the most basic identity of a Christian. Moreover, Ciceronianism violates
the rhetorical principle of decorum, or suiting one’s words to the present circum-
stances, which Erasmus here terms “apposite dicere.”23 Times have changed com-
pletely since the age of Cicero, and nothing has changed more than religion.
Superstitious devotees of Cicero are pagans living in a Christian land. In this
context we might recall, though there is no proof that Erasmus did, Paolo Cortesi’s
metaphor of Latin authors as peregrini or foreign travelers in need of a guide. In
Christian tradition, life on earth is a kind of exile and the Christian is a peregrinus
passing through an alien land on his way to salvation.24 The Ciceronian has hired
the wrong guide to lead him home.
From this metaphorical combat, Erasmus turns to the more serious subject of the
Reformation or what he calls “these upheavals of the new gospel.”25 While others
seek to add fuel to the fire of religious discord, Erasmus prays for divine intervention
to salvage his cherished ideal of Christian concord, to which he would devote one of
his last published works, the De sarcienda ecclesiae concordia of 1533. If only the

21
Epistle 1791, line 67.
22
See above and epistle 1791, lines 45-48: “Obiiciunt uni Erasmo Iovianum Pontanum, hominem, quantum potui ex
scriptis illius perspicere, eruditum, sed mirum in modum verba affectantem. Stylum Erasmi dicunt nihil esse ad huius
stylum.”
23
Epistle 1885, line 133.
24
We can think of St. Augustine’s use of peregrinatio to describe the passage from the city of man to the city of God. The
citizen of the city of God is only a pilgrim in this world (“isto peregrinus in saeculo” City of God XV, 1) or in the pilgrim-
age of this life (“in huius vitae peregrinatione” XV, 6). Augustine, De civitate Dei, ed. Dombart and Kalb, vol. 2 (Stutt-
gart: Teubner, 1993), 59, 65.
25
Epistle 1885, line 162 “hos novi Evangelii tumultus.”
 74 ERIC MACPHAIL

monarchs of Europe would embrace this ideal, he is hopeful that the Church could
weather the storm.26 In conclusion, he exhorts his young correspondent to work for
concord through teaching and study. Enemies can be reconciled in a community of
studies or “societas studiorum.”27 This society, like the Church which Erasmus
aspired to unite, is based on inclusion rather than exclusion.
Finally, in March 1528, the respublica litterarum was able to peruse the first
edition of Erasmus’s dialogue Ciceronianus. The dramatis personae are Bulephorus,
Hypologus, and Nosoponus. Nosoponus is afflicted with a malady designated by
the neologism Zelodulea: he is too eager for the servitude of Ciceronian imitation.
If Nosoponus is the patient, his interlocutors assume the role of doctors or
medical consultants, and their speech will be his cure. The therapeutic value of
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speech emerges in the course of the dialogue as a major theme with evangelical res-
onances.28 Preliminary to any treatment, the patient must display his symptoms,
that is to say, he must explain his Ciceronian mania. The first symptom is a hopeless
confusion of the sacred and the profane. According to Nosoponus,

A sacred vocation like this requires a heart not only pure from all sin but free from all
care, just like the esoteric disciplines of magic, astrology, and so-called alchemy
… .This is the main reason I’ve decided to remain a bachelor, though I’m well aware
what a holy state matrimony is. (CWE 28:352; ASD I-2:613)

The word rendered here as “bachelor” is coelebs, which means celibate or monk. In
effect, Ciceronianism is a parody of monasticism, and Nosoponus has taken vows of
verbal poverty and celibacy. Monasticism was a prime target of humanist satire, in
Erasmus’s Enchiridion, Rabelais’s Gargantua, and elsewhere, because it involves a
denial of individuality.29 The counter-ideal is the recognition of individual self-
expression, which comes to the fore in the course of the dialogue. Another
symptom is complete abstention from spontaneity: the Ciceronian never speaks
extempore (which does not stop Nosoponus from engaging in such a long dialogue
against his own principles). As Nosoponus says, quoting Erasmus’s adages, he is not
ashamed “to smell of the lamp,” or to prefer, in Michel de Montaigne’s terms, “le
parler tardif au parler prompt.”30 Montaigne famously prefers “le parler prompt”
or improvization, putting him at odds with premeditated oratory.31
It doesn’t take long to diagnose the illness, but it does to propose the cure.
Erasmus devotes most of his dialogue to elaborating a healthy doctrine of imitation
based on the rhetorical principle of decorum. Decorum requires us to suit our speech
to present circumstances, and no circumstance further alienates us from Cicero than
26
Epistle 1885, lines 168-170 “Si saltem monarcharum animos iungeret Christiana concordia, utcunque spes esset
Ecclesiae tempestatem posse sedari.”
27
Epistle 1885, line 184.
28
For the same theme in the dedicatory epistle of the Paraphrase on Luke, see Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle, “Erasmus’ Pre-
scription for Henry VIII: Logotherapy,” Renaissance Quarterly 31 (1978), 161-172.
29
Jacques Chomarat, Grammaire et rhétorique chez Erasme (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1981), 842: “un des aspects bien
connus de la pensée d’Erasme, et à vrai dire de maints humanistes, c’est la critique du monachisme, qui, faisant fi des
différences individuelles, soumet tous les moines à une règle uniforme.”
30
CWE 28:356; ASD I-2:616 in reference to adage 671 Olet lucernam. Essay I, 10 “Du parler prompt ou tardif” in
Montaigne, Les Essais, ed. Villey-Saulnier (Paris: PUF, 1978), 39-40.
31
See Daniel Ménager, “Improvisation et mémoire dans les Essais” in Rhétorique de Montaigne, ed. Frank Lestringant
(Paris: Champion, 1985), 101-10.
 ERASMUS AND CHRISTIAN HUMANIST LATIN 75

our religion. “Shall we as Christians,” asks Bulephorus, “before other Christians,

discuss these topics in exactly the same way as the pagan Cicero did before
pagans?” (CWE 28:387; ASD I-2:640). We cannot speak appositely, appropriately,
decorously, if we speak like an ancient pagan from an inaccessibly remote era. The
principle of decorum, what George Pigman calls “historical decorum,” entails a cri-
tique of anachronism, which is one of the most powerful impulses of Erasmus’s dia-
logue.32 Anachronism is, so to speak, the crux of the matter. Latin has to keep up
with the times, or does it? Many humanists on either side of the Alps were
pleased to let the vernacular keep up with the times and to treat Latin as a dead
language, that is to say as an elite language reserved for an elite audience.33 In
that case, anachronism is not invariably a defect. Alternately, the determination to
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make Latin a living language adapted to modern times may itself be a form of ana-
chronism.34 Here as elsewhere, Erasmus’s logic turns against itself.
For an interesting instance of such reversible logic, we can take a brief detour
through the anonymous dialogue Iulius exclusus e coelis, first published in 1517
and widely attributed to Erasmus ever since, an attribution confirmed by the
recent critical edition of Silvana Seidel Menchi (ASD I-8:1-297). In this satiric mas-
terpiece, Pope Julius II is denied entry to heaven by Saint Peter, who quizzes the
famously warlike Pope on his aptitude to bear the title of Vicar of Christ. When chal-
lenged to demonstrate his resemblance to Christ, Julius tells Peter, in effect, “You’re
living in the past”: “Tu fortasse veterem illam ecclesiam adhuc somnias in qua tu …
pontificem agebas” (ASD I-8:288). This is precisely what Bulephorus says of the
Ciceronians when he characterizes them as men “qui veterem Romam rerum
dominam gentemque togatam adhuc somniant” (ASD I-2:694). This curious
verbal echo of the Julius in the Ciceronianus raises the question as to who is
living in the past, Erasmus or the Ciceronians? Why is the ideal of reviving the
purity of the primitive Church any less vulnerable to anachronism than the ideal
of reviving ancient Roman glory? Times have changed for Rome and the Church,
and the appeal to decorum is a double-edged sword.
There is another dimension to historical decorum, which we might call con-
fessional decorum, and which Erasmus would rather ignore. Erasmus is fond
of saying that if Cicero were to come back to life, he would speak differently
than the Ciceronians do. Now, Bulephorus appeals to the style that Cicero
would use “if he were living today as a Christian among Christians” (CWE
28:392; ASD I-2:644). If Nosoponus had his wits about him, he would ask,
“What do you mean: if he were living today in Italy or in Germany?”
Decorum requires a very different style among Lutherans than among Roman
Catholics. Erasmus’s vaunted historicism is in tension with his ideal of Christian
concord. It may be too late to use Christian humanist Latin when Christian
identity has been splintered by confessional identity. Erasmus hints at this
issue in the extensive critique of Christophe de Longueil which concludes his

32
G. W. Pigman, “Imitation and the Renaissance Sense of the Past: The Reception of Erasmus’ Ciceronianus,” Journal of
Medieval and Renaissance Studies 9 (1979), 155-177.
33
This is the position articulated most forcefully by Etienne Dolet in his De Imitatione Ciceroniana of 1535.
34
See Eric MacPhail, “Allegare i Romani: Anachronism and Exemplarity in the Renaissance” Storiografia 6 (2002),
171-179.
 76 ERIC MACPHAIL

invidious survey of European claimants to the title of Ciceronian. Longueil,

Nosoponus reminds us, is the only non-Italian humanist exempted from the
reproach of barbarity (ASD I-2:692), which was evidently a sore spot with
Erasmus.35 Bulephorus rejects Longueil’s candidacy in terms of decorum, stres-
sing that the anachronistic eloquence of his letters and speeches is pointless. A
prime example is the five Latin orations which Longueil composed in praise of
Rome. They are all very fine for school exercises, but what good is such oratory
for more serious matters? For instance, what good is Ciceronian Latin in a theo-
logical dispute with Martin Luther: “Adversus Martinum Lutherum rem agit et
seriam et gravem” (ASD I-2:696). Here we might think that Erasmus, author of
the Hyperaspistes, is gloating over his Roman adversaries, as if to ask, “What
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have you done lately to defend the Church against Luther?” On the one
hand, the point is well taken: Ciceronian style will not win the debate with
Luther. On the other hand, whatever style the Roman Catholic uses, it will
not be the same style as the Lutheran uses. Confessional identity, more than
national identity, imperils Erasmus’s ideal of Christian Latin.
The perils of collective identity may in some ways motivate an aspect of Erasmus’s
theory of imitation that criticism has heralded as genuinely innovative. In respect to
the imitation of rhetorical models, the Ciceronianus places an unprecedented
emphasis on the inalienable nature of the speaker, what we might call personality,
or personal subjectivity, or personal voice. Thomas Greene and Jacques Chomarat
seem to have arrived simultaneously and independently at this insight. For
Greene, “Erasmus magnified an idea preexistent in imitative theory but seldom fore-
grounded so starkly. Imitation for him depended on the individual bent, propensity,
intellectual character, ‘natura’.”36 For Chomarat, somewhat more sensitive to Eras-
mus’s originality, “Erasme seul forme en toute clarté la notion de personnalité.”37
Moreover, as Chomarat points out, this notion is founded on the principle of
decorum. Each one of us has a unique ingenium and our speech has to be true to
our self. As Bulephorus puts it,

Every one of us has his own personal inborn characteristics, and these have such force
that it is useless for a person fitted by nature for one style of speaking to strive to
achieve a different one. As the Greeks say, no one ever succeeded in battling with the
gods. (CWE 28:396–397)

Habent singula mortalium ingenia suum quiddam ac genuinum, quae res tantam habet
vim, ut ad hoc aut illud dicendi genus natura compositus, frustra nitatur ad diversum.
Nulli enim bene cessit θεομαχία, quemadmodum Graeci solent dicere. (ASD I-2:647–648)

Apparently, the Greek adage θεομαχεῖν is equally suited to everyone’s ingenium, but
this is not the place to address the problematic role of commonplaces in self-
expression. To express the ideal relationship between oratio and ingenium, falsified
35
See Eric MacPhail, The Voyage to Rome in French Renaissance Literature (Stanford: Anma Libri, 1990), 26-27.
36
Thomas Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1982), 183.
37
Chomarat 833.
 ERASMUS AND CHRISTIAN HUMANIST LATIN 77

by Ciceronianism, the speaker Bulephorus has recourse to a metaphor whose evan-

gelical connotations demand our full attention:
But if you want to express the whole Cicero, you cannot express yourself, and if you do
not express yourself your speech will be a lying mirror. (CWE 28:399)

Quod si totum vis exprimere Ciceronem, teipsum non potes exprimere. Si teipsum non
exprimis mendax speculum tua fuerit oratio. (ASD I-2:649)

If imitative speech is a distorting mirror, then self-expression is the true mirror of the
mind. Yet, self-expression is complicated by the imitation that it too entails. When
Bulephorus advocates the ideal of teipsum exprimere, we are meant to hear the
words of Angelo Poliziano addressed to Paolo Cortesi: “Non exprimis, inquit
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aliquis, Ciceronem. Quid tum? non enim sum Cicero, me tamen, ut opinor,
exprimo” (Garin 902). When Erasmus looks in the mirror, he sees Poliziano, if
the mirror is true. If it is a lying mirror, he sees Cicero’s reflection. This is the case
partly because the author of the Ciceronianus has a strong personal affinity for Poli-
ziano so that when he repeats Poliziano, he speaks for himself. The character Bule-
phorus expresses the same secret affinity, “arcanam quandam affinitatem” (ASD
I-2:703), for Horace so that his Horatianisms are not a lying mirror. At the end of
the century, Montaigne will capture this paradox when he proclaims, “Je ne dis
les autres sinon pour d’autant plus me dire” (I, 26, 148).38 This strikingly original
use of the reflexive form me dire is also a vernacular echo of the neo-Latin me
exprimo.
The mirror fascinated and preoccupied Erasmus especially in the last decade and a
half of his life.39 Before the Ciceronianus, he essayed the metaphor of the mendax
speculum in the Lingua of 1525. The Lingua is a diatribe on the use and abuse of
the tongue, understood as the faculty of speech, and a good part of the text is
devoted to an indictment of lying which seems, for its very vehemence, to be true,
that is, sincere. The Lingua reminds us that we were given the faculty of speech in
order to communicate with each other our true thoughts and feelings. This reminder
sponsors a terse sequence of analogies:
In hoc est lingua data hominibus, ut hac internuntia homo hominis mentem et animum
cognoscat. Decet autem, ut imago respondeat archetypo. Specula bona fide repraesen-
tant imaginem rei obiectae. Nam quae mendacia vocantur, in hoc tantum adhibentur,
ut risum moveant. Eoque Dei Filius, qui venit in terras, ut per eum cognosceremus
mentem Dei, sermo Patris dici voluit et idem veritas dici voluit, quod turpissimum sit
linguam ab animo dissidere. Nunc inter christianos etiam, Deum immortalem, quam
rara linguae fides! (ASD IV-1A:82; CWE 29:314–315)

The portrait should resemble the model (imago / archetypus). Mirrors faithfully
reflect their object (specula / imago rei obiectae). False mirrors are only used to
38
Michel de Montaigne, Les Essais, ed. Villey-Saulnier (Paris: PUF, 1978). Cited by book, chapter, and page.
39
For the earlier phase of this fascination, see Robert Kilpatrick, “‘Clouds on a Wall’: The Mirror of Speech in the Ada-
giorum Chiliades and the Moriae Encomium,” Erasmus of Rotterdam Society Yearbook 33 (2013), 55-74. Terence
Cave, The Cornucopian Text (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 43, note 10 has a succinct survey of the mirror metaphor
in early sixteenth-century texts. Marie-Luce Demonet traces the genealogy of this metaphor in Les Voix du signe (Paris:
Champion, 1992), 247-274.
 78 ERIC MACPHAIL

provoke laughter. The Son of God is called the speech of the Father, which makes
known the will of God, and the truth, since it is most shameful for the tongue to
differ from the mind (Filius / Pater = sermo / mens = lingua / animus). Unfortunately,
even Christians do not keep the faith of language: they do not speak their mind. This
dense tissue of analogies overwhelms us with specular relationships, which are not
exactly equivalences, between speech and thought or speech and intention. It also
invokes the mystery of the Holy Trinity, and the relationship of God the Father to
his Son, while reasserting Erasmus’s unorthodox translation of logos as sermo
rather than verbum.40 The Trinity is a specular mystery or mysterious mirror as
readers of Erasmus’s Paraphrase on the Gospel of John will recall.
Two years before the Lingua, Erasmus had initiated his Paraphrase on John (1523)
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with a long meditation on the role of Christ as sermo Dei. The paraphrast begins by
denying or refusing analogy: nothing is like God; we are better off believing than
understanding holy mysteries; this simple faith is true religion (LB 7:497A-D;
CWE 46:13–14).41 The brunt of the argument seems to be to discourage speculative
theology.42 However, if we want to impart some understanding of things that are
neither intelligible nor explicable, we have to use words for things that are familiar
to our senses though nothing exists in all of nature to found an adequate comparison
(LB 7:498E; CWE 46:15). Therefore, he proposes the following elaborate system of
analogies based on the relationship of Father to Son in the Holy Trinity:

And so, just as the mysteries of Scripture call the highest mind, than which nothing
greater or better can be conceived, God, likewise they call God’s only Son the Word
of that mind (sermonem illius). For though a son is not the same as his father, yet in
his likeness he reflects as it were his father, so that it is possible to see each one in the
other, the father in a son and the son in a father. But the likeness of begetter and begotten,
which in human begetting is imperfect in many ways, is utterly perfect in God the Father
and his Son. And there is no other object that more fully and clearly expresses the invis-
ible form of the mind than speech that does not lie. Speech is truly the mirror of the heart,
which cannot be seen with the body’s eyes. (CWE 46:15–16; LB 7:499A)

Apparently, the mystery of the Trinity authorizes (though it does not precisely exem-
plify) the specular relationship between our speech and our thought, oratio specu-
lum animi. Human speech cannot be divine, but it does possess a certain secret
power, “occulta quaedam energia,” which transfers the “animum loquentis” into
the “animum auditoris” (LB 7:499B). The Son is called logos because through
this speech God wanted to make himself known to us so that we might achieve
eternal salvation (LB 7:499B; CWE 46:16). Clearly Erasmus is not writing as a
40
For the momentous controversy generated by this translation, see Erika Rummel, Erasmus and his Catholic Critics
vol. 1 1515-1522 (Nieuwkoop: De Graaf, 1989) and Cecilia Asso, La teologia e la grammatica. La controversia tra
Erasmo e Edward Lee (Florence: Olschki, 1993).
41
LB refers to Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami opera omnia, ed. Jean Le Clerc, 10 vols. (Leiden, 1703-1706). Cited by
volume, column, and column section.
42
Philip Melanchthon echoes this emphasis in his Loci communes of 1521, whose first locus, on Christiana cognitio,
specifically repudiates scholastic theologians who scrutinize the mysteries of faith. “Quaeso te, quid assecuti sunt iam
tot seculis scholastici theologistae, cum in his locis solis versarentur? Nonne in disceptationibus suis,ut ille ait, vani
facti sunt, dum tota vita nugantur de universalibus, formalitatibus, connotatis et nescio quibus aliis inanibus vocabulis?”
Melanchthons Werke, vol. 2, pt. 1, ed. Hans Engelland (Gütersloh: Bertelsmann, 1952), 6.
 ERASMUS AND CHRISTIAN HUMANIST LATIN 79

linguist but rather as a theologian and a moralist. The mirroring of thought and
speech is an officium, a moral obligation incumbent on all Christians, and it is
also a key to human salvation. The Ciceronians violate this ethico-religious obli-
gation because they strive to represent in speech someone else’s animus, not their
own.
Accordingly, in the conclusion to the Ciceronianus, Erasmus returns to the motif
of the mirror introduced earlier in the dialogue. As his ultimate argument against the
exclusive imitation of one literary model, Bulephorus appeals to the inexhaustible
variety of nature. It is unnatural for everyone to write or speak in the same way.
Moreover, at the risk of repeating himself, he reminds us that such stylistic confor-
mity is contrary to nature, which intended speech to be the mirror of the mind: “Ut
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ne repetam, quod ipsa quoque natura repugnat isti affectationi, quae voluit oratio-
nem esse speculum animi” (ASD I-2:703; CWE 28:440). Unless speech reflects the
true born image of the mind, it will be a lying mirror: “mendax erit speculum”
(ASD I-2:703). Now Ciceronianism is conflated with lying as a social and spiritual
crisis, or as twin abuses of the tongue. The Ciceronian cannot fulfill the obligation of
the Christian to honor the specular equation of speech and thought signified by the
evangelical definition of the logos. In effect, the identity of the Christian precludes
any other collective identity or conformism because it emphasizes the importance
of individual self-expression. Erasmus has taken Poliziano’s secular ideal of eclectic
imitation and varia lectio and anchored it in his own paraphrase of the Gospel of
John. The result is not exactly orthodox, but it may be the least lying mirror of Eras-
mianism, the “minime mendax speculum animi” promised by the Praise of Folly
(ASD IV-3:74).43
By way of epilogue, we can evoke one of the last and least known echoes of the
Ciceronian controversy, a work by Francesco Florido defending Erasmus against
Etienne Dolet.44 The Ciceronianus came out in 1528, Dolet published his De imita-
tione Ciceroniana in 1535, and Florido followed up with his own chapter on the
controversy in his Succisivae lectiones of 1539, most easily consulted in Janus Gru-
terus’ Lampas sive fax artium liberalium of 1602. Florido was an unlikely champion
of Erasmus, since he had already taken a stand in the controversy, mentioned at the
outset of this paper, between John Argyropoulos and Angelo Poliziano over Cicero’s
credentials as a scholar. Florido defended Cicero against Argyropoulos and all slan-
derers of the Latin tongue in the Apologia in linguae latinae calumniatores of 1537,
revised in 1540. Florido was in fact a Ciceronian in the sense determined by this
fifteenth-century quarrel over cultural hegemony. Yet he could not abide Dolet’s
defense of Cicero and attack on Erasmus. Florido launches his counterattack on
Dolet in a chapter entitled “Which authors are to be read and which ones imitated,”
whose use of the plural announces his eclectic sympathies.45 Florido’s essential point
is that the epithets Ciceronianus and Latinus are not synonyms. He brings out this

43
Compare to Chomarat 840: “C’est ainsi que jusque dans le détail le Ciceronianus donne une image fidèle quoique
voilée du genius d’Erasme: et plus peut-être qu’il ne s’en rendait compte, il illustre en acte sa propre doctrine de
l’écrit miroir de l’âme singulière.”
44
The most thorough treatment of Florido is Scott (note 8 above), 88-97.
45
“Qui auctores sint legendi, quive imitandi” in Janus Gruterus, Lampas sive fax artium liberalium, vol. 1 (Frankfurt,
1602), 1000.
 80 ERIC MACPHAIL

point when he contrasts Longueil’s “frigid” style, which Dolet had the temerity to
admire, with Erasmus’s style, characterized as follows: “scribendi genus, si non
Ciceronianum, Latinum tamen et ad explicandum animi sensum satis perspi-
cuum.”46 Erasmus cultivated, not Ciceronianism, earlier denounced as an
“unheard of superstition” (Gruterus 1000), but rather perspicuity, so that his
meaning shines through his speech. What better tribute could be paid to the
author of the Ciceronianus?
In effect, while Dolet slanders the Latin tradition with his exclusive and invidious
praise of Cicero, in defiance of Cicero’s own practice of imitation, Erasmus emerges
from the fray as the true patriot among the Latins, which is an honor he may not
have anticipated. Florido testifies to the capacity of Italian humanism, on the very
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threshold of the Counter Reformation, to appreciate the style and sense of Erasmus’s
dialogue, if not its evangelical connotations. He may be the last witness to that atti-
tude. Soon confessional identity would eclipse stylistic affinity, and Erasmus would
be ignominiously inscribed on the Index of Prohibited Books. The unexpurgated
voice of Erasmus would fall silent in Italy.

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