Desiderius Erasmus

Today's installment in Who's Who in the Medical Humanities is Erasmus.  I'm somewhat surprised it's taken me this long to address Erasmus in context of medical humanities because Erasmus, like Montaigne, is something of a personal hero of mine.  It's those late humanists that particularly seem to move me (count Vesalius and da Vinci among them for sure, and Machiavelli's thought is often late humanist in content and style, though he lived earlier than all others mentioned here).  As usual, the Who's Who posts begin by surveying the thinker's life, briefly showing connections to humanist instruction and themes, and then moving on to suggest some possible relevance for the practicing medical humanist.

[Note: Biographical information is largely drawn from the online Catholic Encylopedia's entry]

Erasmus was born around 1466 in Rotterdam, an illegitimate child.  At the age of nine, Erasmus "was sent to the school of the celebrated humanist Hegius at Deventer, where his taste for humanism was awakened and his powers of mind received their bent for life."  Id.  Erasmus showed brilliance at an early age, but was derailed by the death of his parents in his early teens.  He entered a monastery school for two years, which he described as "lost years," and then he wandered for some time until his guardians forced him to enter the monastery of Emmaus.  While he did not care for the monk's life, he spent much of his time reading classical authorities, and studied Lorenzo Valla's work as well. 

After leaving the monastery, he entered the Bishop of Cambrai's diplomatic service, and was sent to complete his studies in Paris, but quickly found nothing but contempt for Scholastic pedagogy.  (Already we can see two significant elements of the Renaissance humanist: the immersion in the classical canon, and a distaste for the logic and disputation of Scholastic method).  Id.  His English friend Colet urged him to abandon Scholasticism and devote himself to Scriptual studies, after which Erasmus set about gaining facility with Greek and Latin at Paris and Louvain.  Id.  He began to publish (in the first decade of the sixteenth century), and thereafter sojourned through Italy, receiving an honorary Doctor of Divinity at Turin, and meeting distinguished humanists in Bologna, Padua, and Venice.  He was received well by the cardinals in Rome, but earned both fame and controversy in 1509, when he published In Praise of Folly, which heavily satirized the Catholic Church.

He became a professor of divinity and of Greek at Cambridge, and spent time living in Basel, England, and Louvain between 1514 and 1521.  The Colloquia was published in 1519.  Erasmus' perspectives on the Church must be located in some of the obvious religious tensions of the time, and Martin Luther's activities dialectically interacted with traditional Catholic authority.  Erasmus found himself in a most awkward position, according to HistoryGuide.  He was reviled by traditionalists for igniting the Protestant "heresies," and villified by Luther and his adherents for refusing to give up on the Catholic church and join the protestants. 

And this tough spot is where I want to pick up the question of Erasmus's relevance for the modern medical humanist.  Much of this discussion raises points suggested by Gary Remer in his outstanding book, Humanism and the Rhetoric of Toleration.

Erasmus exchanged many letters with Luther.  Each saw the other as important and worth engaging for a variety of reasons.  Erasmus's undying hope was that through dialogue and cultural exchange, Luther's relatively uncompromosing positions could be accommodated with Catholic authority such that violence could be avoided.  The use of discourse as a pressure release, as a way of preventing war is as humanist an idea as exists (if we recall the studia humanitatis as being characterized in part by a reference to classical sources in the service of virtue).  Erasmus adopted numerous means for facilitating such a dialogue, one of which was his constant focus on the notion of adiaphora.

Adiaphora in Greek means "indifferent things."  Erasmus argued that the number of tenets any Christian must believe in order to "be" a Christian were few in number.  On these core precepts, dissension was not possible without departing from the Christian domain.  On all other matters, which comprised the vast majority of subjects for theological debate, Christian persons of reasonable mind could disagree in good conscience (and all remain Christian, or catholic, in the literal meaning of the word).  These adiaphora were not determinants of Christian identity.  In this way Erasmus sought to accommodate divergent views on faith, salvation, doctrine, and practice.

It should not take too much to see some basic implications for the modern medical humanist.  First, there is the ardor with which Erasmus sought to use dialogue as a way of mediating conflict: this is arguably a paramount role for ethics consultants.  Second, Erasmus's method is ingenious as a way of promoting accommodation of plural views: identify core points upon which some kind of accord seems possible, and suggest that reasonable persons in good conscience can meaningfully debate adiaphora (and these core points need not be universal principles; they may simply be what I like to think of as contingent commonalities, shared perspectives that simply happen to be shared in the particular context at issue).  And note that the notion of adiaphora and Erasmus's political objectives animate a conception of dialogue in the service of a practical, virtuous aim (the prevention of bloodshed).

Perhaps it is not too strong to suggest that the quality of the discourse itself in both medical humanities and bioethics practice could be enhanced if discussion proceeded along Erasmian lines of attempting to disentangle adiaphora from core precepts and working to build assent in the latter.  Of course, it must be noted that Erasmus's objectives were not realized, and wars rooted in religious, among other, disagreements, raged across Europe for the next century and beyond.  Thus, to invoke Erasmus in the service of enhancing conversation and discourse is not to trumpet a utopian ideal, but to suggest there is much to learn from Erasmus' efforts.

Along similar lines, Erasmus spent much time differentiating the roles the orator could take.  Embodying the profoundly humanist notion (traced back to Cicero and Quintillian) that speaking could only be effective (in promoting virtue, of course) if it was strictly tailored and shaped to the particular audience being addressed, Erasmus noted the different patterns of discourse in the contentio and the sermo.  The former exists where the speaker and the audience have different levels of knowledge, perhaps asymmetrical information.  The setting of a contentio is advocative in nature; the speaker aims to exhort, to persuade, to convince.  The objective is persuasion, not necessarily enhancing conceptual knowledge or even collective understanding.

By contrast, in a sermo, the participants are all knowledgeable on the subject of the discussion, which operates more like a dialogue between respected colleagues.  Obviously, if one seeks to enter into a sermo and begins using rhetoric and methods more suited for the contentio, learning may be frustrated and discourse diminished.  This idea of tailoring oration to suit the audience and the aims of speech is the classic rhetorical principle of decorum, suggesting an etymological link for the conceptual point addressed earlier:  the suggestions Erasmus makes for enhancing discourse and communication on matters of public debate are tied to understanding rhetoric and audience.  To the extent the latter is correlated with better communication, this literally is a a core tenet of the humanist project: to use rhetoric in the cultivation of virtue (or virtuous acts, like communicating better).

There is a small but growing bioethics literature on the importance of communication, highlighting the notion that the quality of the communication itself is of ethical content.  Erasmus would probably have agreed.

Comments

[Patrick S. O'Donnell]

Nice post.

Re: 'Embodying the profoundly humanist notion (traced back to Cicero and Quintillian) that speaking could only be effective (in promoting virtue, of course) if it was strictly tailored and shaped to the particular audience being addressed....' I rather suspect that this goes back yet further to Plato and Aristotle, indeed, it is one reason we find Socrates not resorting to the written word and why we read in the Seventh Letter that 'this subject matter cannot at all be expressed in words as other studies can, but instead, from living with the subject itself in frequent dialogue, suddenly, as a light kindled from a leaping flame, [knowledge] comes to be in the soul where it presently mourishes itself.' Indeed, neither written nor spoken words can express (first) principles as they are. Wisdom as such is a non-propositional knowledge 'by acquaintance' (not in the Russellian sense) evidenced in the degree to which one is living one's life well (a 'knowing how'), living the right kind of live (human flourishing or eudaimonia). The Platonic dialectical dialogues make this clear, for although one can write about these principles (or show Socrates discussing them in the agora) one is not thereby communicating knowledge of these principles. In Plato's case, therefore, one must make proper use of rhetoric (unlike the Sophists, for example, who made improper use of same). As Francisco Gonzalez explains, while Plato writes *about*, say, courage and justice or even the good, he resorts to instances (exempla), similes, analogies, metaphors, allegories, and so forth without telling us what the good, or justice, or courage actually is; and for Plato, there is an 'essence' to such things, but it is nonpropositional, an intuitive knowledge by acquaintance that one can only 'point' to with words, propositions, and images (indeed, the resort to propositional knowledge is unavoidable although we must be intimately apprised of its limitations). See, for example, Franciso J. Gonzalez, Dialectica and Dialogue: Plato's Practice of Philosophical Inquiry (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998)

[Patrick S. O'Donnell]

Please read 'living the right kind of life'...

[Patrick S. O'Donnell]

Whoops! The reference should read Francisco J. Gonzalez, Dialectic and Dialogue: Plato's Practice of Philosophical Inquiry....

[N=1]

Thank you, Daniel and Patrick, for such a rich discussion this morning. I would like to ponder the nature a few snippets of the relationship between nurse and patient. Since this is a time and space-bound relationship, one cannot help but think about how the patient and patient role is viewed and acted upon by the nurse. The underpinnings of the code of ethics for nurses allude to this relationship being one of advocacy on behalf of the patient. But many nurses act upon patients as animated objects on which to apply a discrete skill or procedure. There is some degree of passivity and compliance that is assumed to be the role of the patient. Expert nurses are thought to have developed high degrees of intuition and wisdom, which I have attributed to the ability to rapidly scan, assess, diagnose and act upon a very complex and comprehensive patient landscape faster and more subtly than can be observed by others, hence giving the impression of intuiting.

Thank you for hosting a wonderful edition of the Health Wonk Review!