Erasmus in the Twentieth Century: Interpretations c 1920-2000

Anglican Theological Review, Summer 2004 by Sider, Robert D

Erasmus in the Twentieth Century: Interpretations c 1920-2000. By Bruce Mansfield. Erasmus Studies. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. xiv 324 pp. CDN$70.00 (cloth); US$70.00 (cloth).

The National Library of Canada describes this book, not inappropriately, as the final volume in the trilogy which includes Phoenix of His Age (1974) and Man on His Own (1992) (p. iv). In his preface Mansfield is more precise: Erasmus in the Twentieth Century both is and is not a sequel to the two previous studies: it does indeed continue the interpretations of Erasmus analyzed in the two previous volumes, but "it has become a book of a different character" (p. ix). The change was caused by a fundamental shift in the study of Erasmus in the twentieth century from apologetics to "scientific" scholarship. In reflecting on the enormous growth of scholarly publications in the twentieth century, the variety of critical approaches, and the technicalities of scholarship, Mansfield has produced a work that is inevitably more difficult to read than the previous volumes.

It is also less entertaining. In the previous volumes Mansfield was interested not only in the fortunes of Erasmus's reputation, hut also in the writers who shaped the images of Erasmus. Hence the portrait of the Anglican Evangelical Isaac Milner, or the brief but sympathetic biography of Mark Pattison, in rum Anglican Evangelical, Tractarian, and liberal (Man on His Own, pp. 98-99, 159-164). While we seek to understand apologies through the character of their authors, scholarship pretends to be validated by its sheer facelessness. There was little room, therefore, in Erasmus in the Twentieth Century to describe the nexus between the scholar and his subject-though one should not overlook the acute psychological analysis of the tragic Stefan Zweig, distinguished Jewish biographer of Erasmus, who, unable to come to grips with the reality of the Nazi regime, committed suicide in Brazil in 1942 (pp. 8-10).

Mansfield has not, however, been defeated by the challenges of twentieth-century scholarship. This book may not be easy to read, but in both eloquence and illuminating synthesis it matches the preceding volumes. Mansfield s prose is energetic, imagistic, and varied, ranging between the language of high dignity and humble familiarity. Moreover, Mansfield's skill in organization and synthesis has brought coherence to the many-sided scholarship on Erasmus, and set it in an illuminating perspective. Further, Mansfield has embarked upon an intellectual quest, an adventure in locating Erasmus within the geography of twentieth-century thought.

Thus, in two separate chapters Mansfield considers the scholarship represented by the anniversaries of Erasmus's death (1936) and birth (1967-1970). In the former celebrations "his name was attached to values that were manifestly under threat: peace, toleration, liberal education, even democracy" (p. 14); the latter reflected new values, more or less popular, such as concert-going and music, or, on a more restricted level, the "inquiry into the relation between author, text, and readers" (p. 79).

While Mansfield traces the impact of contemporary political ideologies on the scholarly enterprise, the general pattern of critical scholarship in twentieth-century Erasmian studies is in no way disguised. On the contrary, the lines of the various types of criticism are boldly drawn. From a theological perspective, perhaps the most interesting of these are, first, the attempts to interpret Erasmus within the cadres of liberation theology, and second, the rediscovery by Roman Catholics of the Catholic Erasmus. In this respect Vatican II was something of a watershed.

In contrast, Anglicans in the later twentieth century did not generally see in Erasmus a creative source for theology, piety, or liturgy. In this volume, only the great Margaret Mann Phillips is cited as finding in Erasmus "one source of the 'erudite piety' of the Anglican church which she loved, content to live her life in its fellowship and liturgy" (p. 84). Mansfield points to two scholars who have, indeed, explored the influence of Erasmus in the sixteenth-century Church of England; ironically, neither was Anglican (pp. 69-71, 98). James McConica argued for a self-conscious Erasmianism in England "as a social movement, ranging from the aristocracy to a 'popular fringe' " (p. 69), a movement that bore fruit in the injunction of 1547 to place copies of Erasmus's Paraphrases on the Gospels in all English churches. Craig Thompson traced the continuing influence of Erasmus in the second half of that century. To John Foxe, the martyrologist, he was a hero; Bishop Jewel quoted Erasmus, all of whose works he was said to have read at Oxford; and Thomas Cooper regarded him as a singular instrument to begin the Reformation (Erasmus and Tudor England (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1971), pp. 58-60).

Mansfield's first two volumes, on the other hand, point to many Anglicans in each century who made Erasmus their own. It was the Latitudinarians above all who wished to claim Erasmus. Edward Stillingfleet (1635-1699), William Knight (1675-1746), Henry Hart Milman (1791-1868), and Leonard Elliott-Binns, the latter in the early part of the twentieth century, all saw value in Erasmus's work. Thus, from Mansfield, one might conclude that Erasmus was an active presence in the Anglican imagination up to the twentieth century, and it is only in our generation that this historic Anglican attachment to the "prince of humanists" has come undone.