The Italian Origins of the Movement

Renaissance Humanists used the Slogan Ad fontes (to the sources) to promote the use of classical Greek and Latin sources. The humanistic movement grew out of an admiration for classical civilization and the desire to revive and emulate classical authors. It was, moreover, part of a larger movement to study the remains of Greek and Roman culture and to appropriate or recreate its style. The endeavor of collecting the vestiges of the past — particularly on the history of Rome — began in Italy in the fourteenth century. Petrarch, the archetypal figure of the Renaissance humanist, discovered Cicero’s Pro Archia and his letters to Atticus and attempted to reconstruct the first three decades of Livy (the most prominent source for the early history of Rome) from extant manuscripts. Indeed, the hunt for classical manuscripts was a lifelong pursuit for Petrarch, as it was for other humanists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries: Giovanni Boccaccio, Coluccio Salutati, Poggio Bracciolini, Angelo Poliziano, and Lorenzo Valla, to name the most prominent representatives of the drive to collect the literary sources of the past.

Humanists recognized that the texts they unearthed were often corrupt and the meaning and context of many passages obscure to Renaissance readers. They therefore embarked on the task of editing, translating, and annotating the texts to open them up to a larger readership. In the course of collating and emending texts they developed methods of dating manuscripts on the basis of script and established the first principles of textual criticism: among others, verifying historical usage, preferring the older over the later source, and lending greater credibility to the more difficult reading than to the more obvious one. In this way a historical and text-critical methodology emerged that led to a better understanding of the process of textual transmission and to a sharper discrimination between what was original and what was derivative. The scholarly scrutiny of classical texts resulted in commentaries and annotations that surpassed traditional philological considerations by reflecting not only on the grammatical but also on the historical aspects of the text, thus providing a more sophisticated appreciation of the author’s meaning.

In Erasmus' time, Catholic critics circulated the tag, 'Erasmus laid the egg, and Luther hatched it.' The idea that Erasmus was a 'pre-reformer' and that his theology is best studied in the context of Luther’s thought has been perpetuated by modern historians. Protestant theologians, of course, capitalized on the doctrinal differences between the two men rather than on their common ground. This approach prompted Ernst-Wilhelm Kohls to accuse them of using Erasmus as a 'dark foil against which their own hero could shine more brightly'. Alternatively, Erasmus' religious thought has been viewed in the context of Christian humanism, which seems to me a more productive way of examining his theology. In either case, however, Erasmus' lack of a systematic approach has raised serious questions for the would-be interpreter and has led some historians to deny him the title of theologian altogether. Any investigation of his theological concepts must therefore begin with the subject of Erasmus' own claim to the title and the testimony of his contemporaries on that point. Although Erasmus’ professional status may be in doubt, it cannot be disputed that he engaged in activities that come within the purview of a theologian. He formulated a curriculum for theology students; he edited, translated, paraphrased, and expounded biblical and patristic texts; he commented on doctrinal questions; and he offered spiritual advice in devotional tracts. From these writings emerge the main points and general features of his religious thought.