SOURCE: Weintraub, Katy O'Brien. “O Sancte Socrate, Ora Pro Nobis: Erasmus on the Problem of Athens and Jerusalem.” In Cultural Visions: Essays in the History of Culture, edited by Penny Schine Gold and Benjamin C. Sax, pp. 259-70. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000.

[In the following essay, Weintraub looks at Erasmus's efforts to reconcile Christian with pre-Christian thought by focusing on his writings on Socrates, including his famous request, “O Saint Socrates, pray for us.” Weintraub finds that Erasmus does not follow the pattern of other early Christian humanists by using the notion of “natural reason” to unite the two traditions, but instead employs a theological strategy that includes ancient pagans in the unity of creation, emphasizing the omnipotence of God rather than the achievements of individual philosophers.]

For many years one simple quotation from Erasmus formed an important hallmark of the students' experience of the History of Western Civilization course at the University of Chicago: “O Sancte Socrate, Ora pro nobis,” O Saint Socrates, pray for us.¹ Erasmus' creation of this sentence has come to represent an important moment in the history of Western Civilization as well. At this moment Erasmus, fully confident that the cultural tradition begun in Athens and the other cultural tradition represented by Jerusalem could be reconciled with each other, announced their union. Erasmus goes much further than some Christian thinkers who allow that some pagans, because of the goodness of their lives may find a place in heaven. For in Erasmus' view, Socrates, a pagan who may or may not have believed in the Greek gods, had lived a life so holy that he could be numbered among the Christian saints and could be relied on to intercede for believers along with the rest of the saints. Here Erasmus uses the standard liturgical formula of the plea for the intercession of a saint and leaves no ambiguity for the meaning of “Sancte”, he does not mean to call Socrates merely holy, but “Saint.” What did Erasmus know about Socrates and how did he become a saint in Erasmus' eyes? More significantly, what can Erasmus' attitude toward Socrates tell us about the larger issue of how Erasmus conceives of Christian Humanism?

Most of Erasmus' mentions of Socrates are incidental. The most sustained treatment of Socrates by Erasmus is in the Adage Sileni Alcibiadis² and even this is relatively disappointing in scope. The adage examines a metaphor taken from Plato's Symposium in which Alcibiades likens Socrates to a Silenus figure. The Silenus is a novelty figure which is made in the form of a satyr: an ugly, leering, half-man half-animal. The Silenus also has a hidden nature; the figure can be opened up and turned inside out. The inner figure is that of a god, beautiful and encrusted with jewels. Alcibiades refers to Socrates' legendary ugliness and his inner wisdom as the two sides of the Silenus. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of this metaphor is that both sides of the Silenus are “true” even though the inner truth has priority. Erasmus identifies many more Silenus figures including Moses, John the Baptist, and Christ, but continues the adage with a further discussion of how outward appearance in this world tends to be the opposite of inward “reality,” rather than with a further consideration of Socrates. Still, the identification of Socrates as similar to Judeo-Christian religious heroes and even to Christ himself reflects Erasmus' apparent program of an amalgamation of two great traditions of the ancient world.

Of course, Erasmus was neither the first nor the last to attempt an amalgamation of the traditions of Athens and Jerusalem, but from very early on some Christians believed the two were so fundamentally different that they could not be joined. The famous quotation from Tertullian, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?”³, written to confront an apologetic movement hoping to find a common ground between the emerging Christian tradition and the well established schools of Greek philosophy, perhaps should have set the question for later generations, but it was largely ignored by the founders of the medieval synthesis as well as by the proponents of Christian humanism in the sixteenth century.⁴

Tertullian provided a warning question, but the famous dream of Jerome stands as a judgment of those who would become too enamoured of ancient culture.⁵ Jerome reports that in a dream he was hauled before the judgment seat and judged to be a Ciceronian instead of a Christian because of his devotion to the works of antiquity in general and Cicero in particular. He was then scourged and he promised never again to read these writings. Erasmus investigates this “dream” carefully in his edition of Jerome and concludes that it should not be read as a simple rejection of antiquity as some did.⁶ Erasmus' conclusion is very persuasive:

Finally, if it is a chargeable offence to have secular books and if a reader of such works has denied Christ, why was Jerome the only one to be flogged for this?⁷

Instead of seeing Jerome's dream as a judgment against the very idea of Christian humanism, Erasmus reads it as a curious anecdote which should not concern serious scholars.⁸

Even apart from the suspicions of the so-called pious, the challenges to anyone who aspires to unite the traditions are substantial. The tradition of Athens represents a highly rationalistic worldview based on deities who are responsible only for maintaining an ordered cosmos. These gods are not the creators of their world nor are they omniscient: they may know more but they do not know all. They are not radically different from man even though they are responsible, to some degree, for the fate of men. The members of the tradition of Athens are the makers of their own lives and happiness and are subject to divine retribution when they step out of their appointed place in the cosmos. Their attention must be fastened on their rational judgment of where they fit into the order of the cosmos.

On the other hand, the tradition of Jerusalem represents a highly historical worldview based on a single creating God who acts through history to maintain his creation according to his will. The members of the tradition of Jerusalem are dependent on God's will for their happiness, their life, and their ultimate fate. Their attention must be focussed on discovering God's will as presented to them in Scripture and in God's actions in history.⁹

In their most essential character these two traditions do not fit together. They produce two fundamentally different sensitivities to the world and lead their proponents to ask different questions of their world. The Greek world is essentially a rational world and the Judeo-Christian world is essentially a historical world. Still, both traditions remain seductive and both remain ours. One could easily tell the story of Western Civilization as the story of successive attempts to bring about such a combination, or indeed, as a lasting, but shifting, combination of these two traditions in which change can be seen as a continual rebalancing of the two held in a fruitful tension.

Whether the combination is easy or brittle depends in part on how the cultural thinker sees the relationship between the two and on how thorough the proposed combination will be. A thinker who essays to combine the ancient conception of human life as marked by prideful independence with the Christian view of the profound dependence of the creature on its creator will face insurmountable difficulties if both traditions are given equal value. One tradition will have to give way to serve the demands of the other if this combination of views is to be made at all. Our thinker needs a principle by which to judge apparent contradictions and to evaluate individual views presented by the two traditions.

Of course, most thinkers who have tried to reconcile these two inheritances have approached their task from a Christian perspective. They faced their task as miners who sought a vein of truth in the classical tradition which they could use to illuminate the Christian truths they sought to understand¹⁰ They did not seek to bring about a grand marriage of two cultural entities so much as to plunder the culture of antiquity for the “spoils of Egypt”¹¹ usable in Jerusalem. This approach makes it possible to ignore the more essential contradictions and concentrate on the nuggets of wisdom provided by classical thinkers. Justin Martyr provided the early theoretical underpinnings for such an approach maintaining that the ancients saw some of the truth and that “there seem to be seeds of truth among all men,”¹² while the Christians have been given a fuller view.

Still, many questions remain. What is the connection, if there is one, between the cultures of antiquity and Christianity? After all, those ancients were “godless pagans” how can they teach Christians anything that is “true”? Can we adopt any of their teachings without being infected with their concomitant worldview? If Christians study the works of pagans in order to learn about their culture, will they also be converted to paganism in the process? These questions were raised in the context of many attempts to amalgamate the two traditions. They were familiar in the second century Apologetic movement¹³ as well as in the sixteenth century world of Christian humanism.¹⁴

These are the questions asked by Christians concerned to protect Christian truth; modern historicists would like to ask further questions of a different nature. If one approaches the culture of antiquity in this rapacious way, is it possible to understand it truly? Do not the ancients have the right to be understood on their own terms, to be more than instruments in the hands of a more enlightened people? We have to recognize that these further questions are prompted by our desire to know historical truth, as differentiated from the pure truth sought by the Christian humanists, and arise from the respect historicism teaches us for the integrity of cultural moments. Historicism also teaches us that before we can ask the questions our century prompts us to ask, we must first attend to the questions asked by the figures we study and understand them on their own terms.

While we see the difficulties of combining two disparate traditions, Erasmus sees the problem very differently. “What can we say of this, that many—notably Socrates, Diogenes, and Epictetus—have presented a good portion of His teaching.”¹⁵ The differences between the ancients and the Christians are easy to explain and are to be expected, but the similarities are surprising and present a problem to the Christian theologian in Erasmus. How can the Christian humanist explain how similar some ancient teachings are to the teachings of Christ? Part of the work of Christ was teaching work; he brought a message to human beings—a truth they could not discover on their own. Revelation was necessary because of the wounded state of mankind after the fall. And yet, some ancients did understand the message beforehand, at least they arrived at parts of Christ's message on their own. This was going to be difficult to explain.

There was one ready answer available in the sixteenth century. The most traditional theological explanation lay in an appeal to natural reason. Though God did not reveal himself to all human beings, he did give reason to all as a birthright. Although this faculty had been marred by original sin, it still functioned and it was thought to be an important reflection of the image of God in his creatures. Natural reason can navigate the everyday world and, if diligently applied, can glimpse the truth, perhaps not the whole truth, but certainly a portion of it. By his own admission, Socrates derived his teaching by the application of reason. He believed that the just could be determined by the exercise of reason.¹⁶ According to Erasmus, Socrates came very close to understanding the just on these terms. For Socrates, contrary to the received notion of his society, justice required doing right, not answering evil with evil, and this agrees with Christ's teaching.

We might expect a sixteenth century humanist to rely on natural reason as the most likely explanation, especially those scholars who had begun to view human capabilities more optimistically, but Erasmus does not share that point of view. He does not rely on natural reason as an explanation for how some of the ancients came so close to the truth.

Neither does he rely on another possible explanation offered in the sixteenth century: an appeal to the intervention of Hermes Trismegistus. This more unorthodox, not to say bizarre, explanation was suggested by devotees of the prisca theologia such as Ficino.¹⁷ Trismegistus was purported to be the link between Plato and Moses thus forging a bridge between the two traditions.¹⁸ Erasmus was too serious a scholar to fall for such an unlikely connection. Erasmus was extremely dubious about any information about Hermes who was a shadowy figure at best. While in a more orthodox way Justin Martyr had argued that Plato had read the writings of Moses and had learned important lessons from him, Erasmus seems to prefer a different explanation.¹⁹

Unlike some humanists, Erasmus had a healthy respect for the profound limitations of the human mind. He believed that mankind needed the help of revelation in order to understand the truth, but here in some ancients he found a recognizable representation of the truth which would later be presented more fully by Christ. For Erasmus, the question of Athens and Jerusalem must turn on the issue of how some thinkers of Athens found out so much about Jerusalem on their own. The background of the answer is that Erasmus does not believe that any of God's creatures has ever been “on their own.” Unlike some of his contemporaries, Erasmus does not believe that God turned his back on his creatures between the fall of Adam and Eve and the incarnation of Christ. Saint Socrates represents a marvelous opportunity to test the nature of Erasmus' understanding of God's providence with regard to the ancients.

“O Saint Socrates, pray for us” is spoken in the Colloquy “The Godly Feast” and is actually the conclusion to a discussion of several remarks made by ancient pagans which appear fully consonant with Christian teachings.²⁰ Erasmus knows that some think of the ancients as radically separate from Christians and the discussion begins with an admission that mixing the two traditions might be suspect to some: “… and if I thought it lawful to mix anything from profane writers with such religious conversation, I'd present something. …”²¹ The speaker is immediately assured that this boundary itself is suspect. Erasmus is not afraid of contamination by dead pagans; he is confident that he will recognize the truth when he sees it. “On the contrary, whatever is devout and contributes to good morals should not be called profane.”²² Free treatment of the whole history of God's creation is not only possible but wise. The boundary which seems so obvious to us and to some of his contemporaries, the distinction between the two traditions which seems so insurmountable to us is expressly rejected by Erasmus.

Clearly, Erasmus does not share our view of the radical distinction between Athens and Jerusalem. In fact, on closer analysis, he does not really believe that the two traditions are separate.

Of course Sacred Scripture is the basic authority in everything; yet I sometimes run across ancient sayings or pagan writings—even the poets'—so purely and reverently expressed, and so inspired, that I can't help believing their authors' hearts were moved by some divine power.²³

Erasmus recognized holy messages in the writings of some of the ancients and concluded that some of the ancients had been divinely inspired. It is the message and not the messenger which is to be judged. If the message is good, then it must have come from the source of all goodness. What truth emerges from Athens must come from the same source as the truth of Jerusalem. Erasmus does not applaud the noble strivings of natural reason the ancients were given at birth here, but points to divine inspiration as the explanation.

What makes it possible to think of Athens and Jerusalem in this way? It is possible only if you think of the ancients not as sinning godless pagans suffering from the effects of original sin and living in a world God spurned until the incarnation, but as creatures of that same God, a God who loved them and took care of them even though they did not know him. For the theologian, the doctrine is simple: it is a thoroughgoing belief in the unity of creation. There is only one creator of this world and anything good or true in it comes from that creator. There is no room in this conception for Neo-Platonic demi-gods who create the world or for some power of evil which creates sin and fosters paganism. There is also little room for significant human action. Although human beings remain responsible for their shortcomings, no human can do anything significant regarding truth without help from the creator. The doctrine of the unity of creation guarantees the omnipotence and sovereignty of God and brings the dependence of the creatures—all creatures—on the creator into sharp focus.

All truth comes from the creator; therefore, if Socrates knows any truth, he learned it from the creator and was lead to it by that creator. As Erasmus says so clearly in the Enchiridion, “… any truth you come upon at any place is Christ's.”²⁴ Truth is one and can have only one source. Human beings are weakened vessels according to Erasmus and they need divine assistance in order to see the truth.

Erasmus goes further, suggesting that the inspiration of these ancients was provided by Christ. “And perhaps the spirit of Christ is more widespread than we understand, and the company of saints includes many not in our calendar.”²⁵ Just as Augustine composed his Confessions to discover the unity of his life—a life unified by God's constant care—Erasmus explains the truth discovered by the ancients as more evidence of God's constant care for his creatures and of Christ's constant love and aid for mankind. This means that Christ was active in the world even before the Incarnation and that the whole idea of viewing the relation between Athens and Jerusalem as a conflict is misguided.

Of course, the evidence for this interpretation has been drawn from a single colloquy, in fact from roughly three pages of the enormous corpus of Erasmus' work. Additionally, one might object that any use of a colloquy as evidence of Erasmus' view on anything must be supported by evidence from other writings as well. Because the Colloquies were written to entice and entertain students of the Latin language and therefore are better evidence of what Erasmus thought would appeal to the imagination and sense of humor of young boys, we cannot assume that what Erasmus says in a colloquy is something that he believes. On the other hand, because of his principle of economy of education—never teach only one thing when you could be teaching two—he always laced his Latin lessons with moral lessons or other lessons he definitely wanted to teach. Seemingly insignificant messages delivered in a colloquy may very well be intended to be significant.

The Colloquies present many issues which would be beyond the ken of young boys when they begin to study. Viewed as a whole, the Colloquies are a grand soapbox on whose stage Erasmus plans the formation not simply of good latinists, but of good Christians and good human beings. These good and learned people will have learned how to view the inheritance of antiquity with wisdom, and what better attitude could they have than the one represented by “O Saint Socrates, pray for us”? They will have learned to be free students of the past, able to discern the truth without regard to its apparent source. They will be Christian humanists who are not afraid to adopt a liberal attitude toward the ancients because they know that any truth comes from Christ.

One of Erasmus' earliest works provides further evidence for this interpretation of his invocation of Saint Socrates.²⁶ The Antibarbari is a dialogue in defense of the study of the ancients by Christians and an attack on the “barbarians” who would prevent their study on the grounds that it will promote a renaissance of paganism. Like many of his books, Erasmus worked on it over the course of years, publishing an edition, tinkering, and bringing out new editions. On the one hand, it is one of his earliest books, and on the other, it was a book he lived with for most of his life. We need have no reservations about the Antibarbari as evidence of Erasmus' beliefs. It provides a more sustained argument for the influence of Christ on the ancients which is stated more briefly but perhaps more strikingly in the “Godly Feast.”

Here Erasmus defines divine providence, and more specifically, the activity of Christ among the ancients:

Everything in the pagan world that was valiantly done, brilliantly said, ingeniously thought, diligently transmitted, had been prepared by Christ for his society. He it was who supplied the intellect, who added the zest for inquiry, and it was through him alone that they found what they sought.²⁷

It might be easy to read over this passage without realizing its profound significance, and not notice that Erasmus is claiming that the ancients were inspired by Christ even though they were not aware of it at the time.²⁸ God did not turn his back on creation after the fall; Christ was active among the creatures bringing them all that is true, noble, excellent, and good. While Christ's contributions are necessary to the success of any of these endeavors, the ancients must contribute as well. Erasmus does not envision Christ's inspiration as a direct revelation of truth to the ancients. Christ prepares the way, he gives the intellect, he awakens the mind, and the ancients come to the truth through him.²⁹ For this kind of action, the person acted upon would not need to be aware of this influence. Christ sets the circumstances of the ancients, gives them particular kinds of minds, and helps them find the answers. It might be suggested that this would fit into the argument that relies on natural reason to explain the accomplishments of the ancients, but Erasmus sees their accomplishments as clearly directed and even focussed by Christ.

In the first place, the ancients were given the task of discovering the disciplines; “… it was not without divine guidance that the business of discovering systems of knowledge was given to the pagans.”³⁰ According to this argument, Christ wanted his creatures to have an understanding of the liberal arts, and the pagans were given that task as a part of the divine plan. Of course the pagans needed the liberal arts to enrich their own existence and to communicate with each other, but Erasmus suspects that there is a greater purpose behind this part of the divine plan.

We should note the emphasis Erasmus places on the discovery of these disciplines, Erasmus uses Augustine as added authority for this. “… because men themselves did not produce them [the disciplines], but dug them out like gold and silver from what might be called the ore of divine providence which runs through all things.”³¹ This view of the discovery of the liberal arts gives meaning to the age between the fall and the incarnation, putting God's mark on the age and uniting it to the Christian era. Of course it also puts God's mark on the disciplines themselves making any distrust of them at least a partial rejection of God's plan for this world.

Erasmus calls this task given to the ancients a “privilege”:

So while Christ, the greatest and best of all disposers, allocated to his own century in a special way the recognition of the highest good, he gave the centuries immediately preceding a privilege of their own, they were to reach the thing nearest to the highest good, that is, the summit of learning.³²

What had been thought of as human learning, or secular or even profane wisdom must be seen quite differently now. With our new perspective on this age, all that is valuable and noble and true must be viewed as the work of the Lord, or at the very least, people doing God's work. These so-called pagans are actually central players in the divine drama; they had their own divinely ordained part to play on the stage of human history and they did it well. Their religious orientation can now be seen as secondary to their function in the history of the human relation to divine reality. Even though they did not know God themselves and misunderstood the true nature of God, they did serve the divine purpose of preparing people to accept the message Christ would bring.

Christ's providence extends beyond the individual pagan to govern all of “his society” [suae Reipublica]. Erasmus believes Christ prepared this society for the Incarnation. “Many of the philosophers wore out their lives and their brains in seeking the highest good; but the real highest good, the perfect gift, was reserved by Christ for his own time.”³³ The divine plan included care for the way in which the truth would be unfolded and discovered. Before the whole truth would be presented to the creatures, they would be led to a partial understanding of things. Christ's teachings then, could be understood not as a radically new philosophy, but as the completion of a course well begun. Christ's teaching would complete the picture already sketched by the pagan philosophers.³⁴

Erasmus gives his outline of the situation in another text where the discusses boys' tendency toward evil:

This truth was already known to pagan philosophers and caused them much perplexity, but their speculations were unable to penetrate to the real cause, and it was left to Christian theology to teach the truth that since Adam, the first man of the human race, a disposition to evil has been deeply engrained in us.³⁵

Christ allowed the pagans to remain perplexed about certain issues. They recognized the issues, but could not solve them on their own. Only Christ could provide the complete explanation for the issues raised by the perceived human condition. As Erasmus points out in the Paraclesis, “he alone could teach certain doctrine, since it is eternal wisdom.”³⁶ Of course in the Paraclesis Erasmus is not describing the progress of knowledge on the world stage as much as he is trying to exhort scholars to study Scripture. In that text we find an argument which suggests that people are spending too much time studying the ancients and are not taking the Christian sources seriously enough.³⁷ The ancients themselves were only allowed to understand as much as Christ wanted them to grasp.

Of course the ancients were subject to original sin too, but they had the aid of Christ in doing God's will to understand as much as they could on their own, still we have to remember that they were not entirely on their own but only appeared to be so. On one level, the next question will be: if the ancients were truly doing God's will, will they be rewarded for so doing or will they be punished because they did not live up to the Christian requirement of believing in Christ?³⁸

Augustine believed the pagans were in hell because they did not know God, Luther located them there because they were motivated by self-love and did not have faith, but Erasmus can get them into heaven because they were doing God's work. On one level, Erasmus has no patience for the question:

Really, who can bear this capricious way of sitting in judgement, waving a Mercurial wand and sending off whoever they wish to hell, and calling up whom they wish to heaven. I will not enter here on that quarrelsome discussion about the pagans, which is unworthy even of women; it is not for us to discuss the damnation of the heathen, those, I mean, who lived before our faith.³⁹

Erasmus claims a diplomatic posture that does not pre-judge the lives of pagans, and that retains a properly humble attitude with regard to the judgment of God. Who are these people who know who belongs in heaven and who belongs in hell? They are the very barbarians who would outlaw the study of antiquity on religious grounds. For them, Erasmus shows no mercy. He continues:

If we wished to indulge in guesswork, I could easily prove that the great men among the pagans are saved, or else no one is; let us concern ourselves with the fineness of their teaching, rather than ask ourselves how well they lived.⁴⁰

So, those “who lived before our faith” will apparently be judged on different grounds than those who lived after the Crucifixion. Of course it would take us too far afield to try to determine just what belief is required for salvation, but Erasmus seems to think there might be much more flexibility in this doctrine than many other Christian theologians would have us think. At least it may be so in the case of those who had no opportunity to believe in Christ. If Christ directed the pagans in their intellectual strivings, it would not be just, much less merciful, to send them to hell simply because they lived before the Incarnation.

Surely this a beautiful explanation of the whole history of human endeavor for the Christian, both preserving the unity of creation and showing the providential activity of Christ in the time between creation and the Incarnation and, as an added bonus, providing for the usefulness of the activities of the ancients. This explains the role of the ancients in a world always governed by God's careful love, and insures the thoroughgoing unity of creation. It is perhaps an explanation that uniquely fits its time.

The wider culture had moved beyond the typical medieval position: the simple view of the ancients as heathen who studied the things of his world with their natural reason. The medieval attempt to use the tools of Aristotelian logic to explicate problems of Christian theology carried with it the germ of two ideas that could lead to the more humanistic approach of the renaissance. On the one hand, they had the best authority in Augustine for the legitimacy of using the cultural goods of the ancients for Christian purposes. Perhaps more importantly, the Scholastic identification of a symmetry between this world and the next founded on the rationality of God invests this world with a new, more positive valuation. This world was no longer seen only as a veil of tears, a place to be travelled through sadly because one's true home was in the next. The identification of this world more closely with its creator grants a new legitimacy and value to this world. By shifting the balance of interpretation concerning this world, the Scholastics legitimized the future approach of nascent scientists to search for the order of the rational universe and perhaps also invited renaissance humanists to study other aspects of antiquity.⁴¹

Believing Christians of the sixteenth century must have wondered how the ancients could have produced so many wonderful cultural goods without the aid of revelation. As Christians became more aware of the cultural products of antiquity they had to admit that many of them were good and they needed an explanation for that. This need for an explanation is forced by the simultaneous beliefs that human beings are seriously flawed and are capable of greatness. True Christian humanists are committed to both these insights and perhaps they do need to misunderstand just enough of antiquity in order to find a way to fit it to their understanding of Christian truth. At the same time, Erasmus' explanation relieves them of the need to see the two traditions as necessarily opposed to each other.

But, as a historian of the twentieth century, I have to wonder just how much violence Erasmus has really done to Socrates by seeing him as he does. Erasmus did not do the ancients justice in seeing them as mere tools of divine providence. If understood on their own terms, they will be seen to be fully fitted to their own civilization. Most of them believed in the values of self-reliance, pride, family loyalty, and most believed in the influence of their gods on the fate of their lives and their city-states. Furthermore, most believed that the only reality was fully visible in this world—that success in this world and a lasting reputation were the only aims and the only rewards to be hoped for in their existence. Unlike Socrates, most did not believe in an afterlife; most did not believe in platonic forms or ideas. Yet these are the people who did God's work according to Erasmus, they developed language, they worked to systematize rhetoric and dialectic and the rest of the so-called human sciences. Socrates and Plato do seem to have imagined more to the universe than this readily apparent world. They represent a step beyond the general understanding of cosmology in pagan antiquity.

Perhaps Socrates deserved to have Erasmus understand him better than he did, and if that were to be the final word on Socrates we would be rightly concerned. But we have a much richer view of Socrates available to us than this. We can see what Plato says about him, what Xenophon reports about him, what Cicero thinks about him, and what scholars have thought over the centuries, including the scholars of our own century. Whatever damage Erasmus has done to Socrates' memory is of little consequence in the long view. As historicists, we aspire to understand historical figures on their own terms and hope to be honest advocates for their right to be so understood. Part of that story is also the story of how historical figures have been seen by other historical figures and what might have led them to misunderstand their predecessors. In Erasmus' case, there were compelling cultural reasons for him to see Socrates and some other ancients as doing the work assigned them by God's providential plan. It is possible for us to blame Erasmus for not sharing our historicist view and giving Socrates his due though I cannot imagine the attraction of such a position. For us in looking back, however, it is much more interesting to watch Erasmus struggling with the legacy of Athens and Jerusalem and trying heroically to make human history whole.

Notes

1. Karl J. Weintraub, “Erasmus” unpublished lecture. The quotation from Erasmus appears in “The Godly Feast,” and can be found in Erasmus, Ten Colloquies, trans. Craig R. Thompson (New York: Macmillan, 1986), 158.

2. Erasmus, Sileni Alcibiadis from Adagia III:III:i. A translation appears in Margaret Mann Phillips' collection, Erasmus On His Times: A Shortened Version of the Adages of Erasmus (London: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 77-97.

3. Tertullian, On Prescription Against Heretics, in The Ante-Nicene Fathers (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmann's, 1973) 3:246.

4. It has been largely ignored as a framing question by modern scholars as well; though one can see a parallel approach in the essay of Ernst Troeltsch entitled “Renaissance And Reformation” available in English in The Reformation: Basic Interpretations, ed. Lewis Spitz (Lexington, Mass: D.C. Heath, 1972). There Troeltsch attempted to discourage the artificial divorce between the Renaissance and the Reformation. He held that the two movements must be understood together if the period is to be understood at all. So while recognizing that scholars could see the Renaissance as simply the child of Athens and the Reformation as simply the child of Jerusalem, Troeltsch argued that this would falsify the period as a whole. Few followed his advice. While there has been a great deal of work done on how Christian Humanists attempted to use antique sources, few scholars have asked the question of how these figures conceived of the relation between the two traditions. In fact, Marjorie O'Rourke Boyle claims that hers is “the first book devoted to investigating the scholarly commonplace that Erasmus' revival of classical learning defines his evangelical humanism” (Christening Pagan Mysteries: Erasmus in Pursuit of Wisdom [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981], xi).

5. Erasmus, Collected Works of Erasmus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974-), 61:174; hereafter cited as CWE. Erasmus includes Jerome's account of his dream in his own edition of the works of Jerome.

6. Ibid., 61:50-52.

7. Ibid., 61:51.

8. Ibid., 61:51-52. Erasmus argues that since Jerome reports the event in two different ways, it is difficult even to know what actually happened.

9. Of course these are ideal type constructions of these two traditions for the sake of understanding how someone in the sixteenth century as a receiver of the traditions might think of them. It is a simple way of thinking about the two as received traditions which is not concerned with the degree to which the Greeks were not always rational or the Jews were sometimes more concerned with the eternal message of their God. It also undermines a more sophisticated understanding of the degree to which the emergent Christian tradition was always affected by both Athens and Jerusalem. It is my hope that drawing the distinction so sharply, and perhaps simply, will serve to highlight certain aspects of the problem.

10. Medieval scholastics turned to Aristotle for the tools of philosophy, both logic and metaphysics, in the hope of finding powerful new ways of understanding Christian revelation. They were less interested in the literary, moral, and rhetorical products of antiquity that would so beguile the humanists of the sixteenth century.

11. Erasmus, Enchiridion, trans. and ed. Raymond Himelick (Gloucester, Mass: Peter Smith, 1970), 96. Exodus 12:35-36, perhaps through Augustine, De doctrina Christiana, trans. D. W. Robertson (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958), 2:40:60.

12. Justin Martyr, First Apology in The Ante-Nicene Fathers (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmann's, 1975), 1:177.

13. Tertullian, Against Heretics, 3:246.

14. Even Erasmus worried about the possibility that students of the classics might be infected by the moral habits displayed in pagan literature (Enchiridion, 50-51).

15. Erasmus, Paraclesis, in Christian Humanism and The Reformation, ed. John Olin (New York: Fordham University Press, 1975), 101. Unfortunately, Erasmus does not go on to answer this very clear question in the subsequent passage.

16. It is interesting to reflect on the fact that Socrates uses the Greek word logos to designate reason. Logos is a word which is extremely important in the Bible and was generally thought to refer to Christ. Erasmus, because of his very controversial translation of logos in John 1:1—substituting sermo for the traditional verbum—knew well what logos ought to mean, at least in the sixteenth century. See his discussion of the elements of its meaning in Erasmus, Apologia pro in principio erat sermo, in Erasmus, Opera Omnia, ed. Jean LeClerc, 10 vols. (1703-1706; reprinted Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1962), 9:113 D-F; hereafter cited as LB.

17. D. P. Walker, The Ancient Theology (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972). See the introduction for Walker's account of the reasoning whereby Plato was seen as a “disciple” of Moses (1-21). See especially: “… as Numenius, a Neoplatonist, asked: ‘What is Plato but Moses talking Attic Greek?’” (12).

18. Frances Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (New York: Random House, 1969) Yates details the humanist rejection of this school of interpretation (159-68); see especially pp. 164-65, for Erasmus' rejection of any suggestion of his own connection to the Hermetic prisca theologia.

19. This may be because Erasmus prefers to concentrate on the New Testament as the vehicle for the whole truth. Justin is also more interested in the cosmological similarities while Erasmus tends to emphasize similarities in Socrates' understanding of justice.

20. Erasmus, “Godly Feast,” 155-58.

21. Ibid., 155.

22. Ibid.

23. Ibid.

24. Erasmus, Enchiridion, 56.

25. Erasmus, “Godly Feast,” 155.

26. Margaret Mann Phillips, Introduction to The Antibarbarians, in CWE, 23:9. As Phillips points out: “Erasmus never stated his case better, even in the famous colloquy …”

27. “Omnia Ethnicorum fortiter facta, scite dicta, ingeniose cogitata, industrie tradita, suae Reipublicae praeparaverat Christus. IlIe ministraverat ingenium, ille quaerendi ardorem adjecerat, nec alio auctore quaesita inveniebant” (Erasmus, Antibarbari, CWE, 23:60, LB 10:1713A).

28. For a different reading of this passage, see Boyle, Christening, 11. Boyle argues that Erasmus actively “Christens” pagan antiquity; I think it is more proper to say that Erasmus thought he discovered the work of divine providence in the history of human knowledge. Thus, Erasmus was not forging an alliance between the two traditions but discovering the contribution the ancients made to the only tradition of truth.

29. Boyle nominates philosophy as the tool Christ uses to entice the ancients to truth, just as the Hebrews were given the Law as their entree to truth (Christening, 17). The evidence I have located seems to suggest a more active role for Christ than this seems to imply.

30. Erasmus, Antibarbari, CWE, 23:59.

31. Ibid., 23:98. Erasmus is paraphrasing from Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana, 2:40:60. Erasmus does not usually rely on arguments from authority or even adduce them for support; it may be a sign that he knows he is arguing a controversial point.

32. Ibid., 23:61.

33. Ibid., 23:60.

34. This was also the plan Erasmus sketched for the education of Christian children: they should first study the ancients and then, well-trained in the disciplines, should turn to a study of Christian teachings. See also Boyle, who identifies the important difference between allowing the study of the ancients as permissible and Erasmus' claim that it is necessary and proper to study the ancients as propaedeutic to the study of Christian theology (Christening, 11).

35. Erasmus, De Pueris Instituendis, CWE, 26:321.

36. Erasmus, Paraclesis, 95.

37. Any reader of Erasmus needs to be aware of his rhetorical training; his statements need to be judged according to the highest rhetorical standards. The rhetorician must be extremely sensitive to his audience and the listener must take into account the purpose of the speech. Perhaps it has been a weak understanding of the principles of rhetoric that have led some people to complain that Erasmus was slippery or ambiguous in his belief. He argues differently to different audiences because different audiences have different needs and require different modes of persuasion. If he is trying to exhort scholars to study Scripture, he is not likely to explain the history of the discovery of truth.

38. Certain Christian theologians would quickly argue that if you let pagans into heaven on this flimsy basis, then Christ died to no purpose; that is, if anyone gets into heaven before Christ's sacrifice then his crucifixion is cheapened and was not truly necessary. Of course, they would argue this only with regard to the pagans, no one that I know of would argue that Abraham, Moses, or David is not in heaven. Erasmus would argue that to think that God would use these individuals to his own purpose and then damn them would be unimaginable because God has professed his love for his creatures and if there are creatures who freely do his will he would not damn them.

39. Erasmus, Antibarbari, CWE, 23:57. Please forgive him for his comment about women, he is accurately reflecting the contemporary view. He does respect women of learning or station, the first genuinely, the other conveniently.

40. Ibid., 23:57-58.

41. Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: Macmillan, 1925). See in particular his first chapter on “The Origins of Modern Science.”