The key points
- Sacred Scripture is a universal heritage
Nn September 1514 Erasmus, almost fifty years old and already well known as the author of the Adagi and In praise of madness , arrived in Basel with another suitcase full of manuscripts to present to his friend the printer Froben for printing, which would have clogged the workshop for three years. There were a volume of Similitudes , translations of Plutarch, editions of Latin classics and of St. Jerome, and the annotated New Testament.
In this last text, Erasmus thinks and maintains with a modern criterion that Sacred Scripture is a universal patrimony and must not remain the exclusive field of theologians and ecclesiastics, but rather made accessible in translations and open to “all Christian peasants”, who intone some of it. verse pushing the plow, as well as the weaver maneuvering the shuttles and the wayfarer to relieve the tedium of the journey; even if all of these are illiterate and sissy, because it is the Gospels that the Christian must hold fast to, understanding what he can and without envying those who understand more than him. Therefore it is convenient and beneficial that the sacred texts are translated into the vernacular, contrary to what many think and want. There everyone can draw on a philosophy that does not reject anyone, admirable to the highest and within reach of the little ones; which nourishes, supports and warms with its milk; where the thought of all philosophical schools is clarified and completed. Of stoicism, which intuited and asserted that only the just man is wise; of Socrates, when he teaches that one must not respond to violence with violence, and that since the soul is immortal, those who pass away into the afterlife after a well-lived life are happy; of Aristotle, who abominated every form of pleasure except that deriving from virtue; even Epicurus professes that without an upright conscience one cannot enjoy any genuine pleasure.
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The Sorbonne
It is a stance that makes the high centers of culture suspicious, scandalized and shaken. The infuriated Sorbonne describes the author of these exhortations and these proposals as an arrogant grammar pupil and a Greek theologian. All the more so since the biblical positions and proposals of Martin Luther could be seen behind him. Yet, the success of those proposals and those texts was enormous, from the first editions in folio to the following eighth editions at printers throughout Europe. Beyond even the specific theme, they contain a real program of “mass acculturation”, as he sees and defines it in publishing the four prefaces and exhortations to the sacred readings, in translation with specially prepared front-facing Latin and with ample commentary, Silvana Seidel Menchi in the New Universal Einaudi. The curator is by Erasmo, a very expert and faithful interpreter; at Einaudi and in the same series he gave a large edition of six in 1980 Adagia politicians.
But beyond the interest and the values enunciated so far, it is also necessary to gather an elucidation in the Introduction, in which it is underlined how, although the author disdained here the praises for the erudition and pointed rather those for the fervor and the passion that inspired and burned in it, these pages too are teeming with erudite repetitions and quotations and the rhetorical art shines there, not empty but with a strong emotional hold; texts of high doctrine, they are also of high eloquence. As in everything about him who crossed all the seas of culture and classical literatures and wrote about it as a pedagogue and colleague, with such brilliance, adds the curator, that he was unattainable in any modern language and without terms of comparison even in classical Latin.
Mythical poets
Erasmus himself invokes in the first Paraclesi, as if to appropriate it, the fabulous and suggestive power of the word as it appears in the mythical poets; the voice of Amphion moving the hard stones, and the sound of Orpheus’ lyre attracting oaks and ash trees; or the historical eloquence of Socrates who bewitched Alcibiades by seducing the ears with a fleeting delight and thereby hooked the hearts of the listeners, leaving them in the end different from what they were before.