"Slowly Slowly Catchy Monkey"

It was only after I was well into adulthood that I heard this saying.  It came from a client of the generation ahead of me, and we must have been talking about getting things done.  I have long forgotten the details of the conversation, other than the saying itself and the click of the light bulb turning on in my brain.

Here is blog post that discusses this adage in a helpful way.

The matter of not rushing things has been the subject of previous posts of mine recently (here and here) as I have been reading from the Adages of Erasmus.

Sat Cito, Si Sat Bene: It Is Done Soon Enough If It Is Done Well Enough

In Erasmus' essay on Festina Lente, he writes that one of the uses of the adage "Festina Lente," which means "Make Haste Slowly,"

is to point out that precipitate action should be avoided in everything, that hastiness is a fault to which some natures are especially prone, and to them any delay at all seems protracted.  This kind of hurry has companions: error and repentance, according to that line celebrated among the Greeks,

"Hasty action is the cause of many ills"

Such people should have the noble maxim of Cato [sat cito, si sat bene] dinned into their ears, "It is done soon enough if it is done well enough .  .  .  "

Festina Lente: Make Haste Slowly

“The circle, according to the accepted meaning, signifies eternity, because it has no end.  The anchor, because it delays, slows down and stops the ship, means slowness; the dolphin represents speed, because there is no creature swifter or more agile in its onrush.  So by putting these meanings together you have the phrase Always hasten slowly.”

From the 1508 Edition of Erasmus’ Adages, quoted in Phillips, Margaret Mann, Erasmus on His Times – a Shortened Version of “the Adages of Erasmus” (Cambridge University press 1967) at page 6.  Erasmus wrote that festina lente, make haste slowly, was "the favorite maxim of Octavius Caesar, the chosen symbol of Titus Vespasianus in old days, and of Aldus today."

Aldus Manutius, whose name appears on the second image, was a famous Italian printer of the Renaissance, and the image was his logo.  The care with which he printed books made him a favorite of Erasmus.  Erasmus includes several paragraphs of praise for Aldus in his essay on festina lente.

What are the Humanities? Any Course not a STEM course?

This provocative interview of President Obama raises the issue, in my opinion.  His definition of the Humanities appears to be this:  Anything offered by the Academy other than science, technology, engineering and math, regardless of its rigor or the lack of it.  He implies, further, that we don't need "Humanities" all that much anymore and certainly not now.

We have, after all, the media elites.  They can do the thinking for us.

The word "Humanities," however, derives from the 16th Century Humanists, those artists, scholars, theologians, philosophers, princes, musicians, even merchants, builders, soldiers and sailors, and other people who were readers and mainly lived in or had their economic base in cities.  These are the people who ushered in the Renaissance and the Reformation, all on the back of a revolution in technology, with such things as the printing press, advances in architecture, vessels that could sail around the world, and the precursors of modern weaponry.  Some of these people were competent in Latin, Greek,  Hebrew, and even Aramaic ("Chadlean"), the wisdom of the Ancients.  They had the ability to translate and communicate such wisdom into the vernacular and to apply it all to rapidly changing circumstances.  They were keen observers; they mastered critical thinking and the craft of their respective callings.  Oh, for more of those people now!

To separate true "Humanities" and "STEM" is simply folly.

Erasmus worked at a stand-up desk.

Both Holbein and every other of the portraitists made the error of having Erasmus pose seated.  He worked habitually standing.

-Bainton, Erasmus of Christendom (Crossroad Publishing Co. 1982), p. 237

Erasmus and Bible Study. Walter and Koine.

Erasmus is known for the first publication of a New Testament in Greek, the first edition in 1516.  (This followed, of course, the invention of the printing press around 1439.)  Bainton writes, however, that “we are not to exaggerate the significance of mere publication.  .  .  .  The contribution of Erasmus to Biblical studies lies even more in the questions which he raised, the controversies which he precipitated, and the awareness which he created as to the problems of text, translation, and interpretation.”  Bainton, Erasmus of Christendom, (Crossroads Paperback 1982) at page 134.

After Erasmus put together the Greek text, he translated the text into Latin.  Bainton writes about the translation task in part as follows:

At this point Erasmus noted that Greek was not the mother tongue of the evangelists and their use of it was affected by their native idioms.  They did not write the Greek of Demosthenes.  “Do you mean to say,” demanded John Eck in Germany [later one of Luther’s adversaries], “that the best Greek was not written by the apostles on whom the Holy Spirit conferred the gift of tongues?”  “My dear fellow,” answered Erasmus, “if you will look at the list of languages of which the Holy Spirit gave command to the apostles on the day of Pentecost you will discover that Greek was not one of them.  Besides the gift lasted for only one day.”  Ibid., p. 139. 

When Walter was a freshman at Davidson College, he decided to major in Classics so that he could study Greek.  He wanted to be able to read the New Testament in the original text.  First Davidson required him to take Classical Greek, and only then “New Testament Greek," known as Koine.  Finally, he got to the New Testament.  He told me that he was surprised to see the variation in the quality of the Greek, especially among the four Gospels (I recall that he said that the Gospel of Mark was the roughest and John the most elegant).

(Bainton, in his notes to his chapter on Erasmus' "publication, translation, and elucidation" of the NT cites Bruce Metzger, The Text of the New Testament (Oxford, 1964).  That title is also in Bainton's bibliography.  As I have mentioned several times, I had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Metzger during the 1970s when he visited our church to give a series of lectures on the Sermon on the Mount. They were splendid lectures.)  

Erasmus, Thomas á Kempis, and the Brethren of the Common Life

            Deventer [a town in the Dutch province of Overijssel, an intellectual center when Erasmus lived and in which he attended school as a child] was impregnated by the spirit of the Devotio Moderna, the “modern piety” of the Brethren of the Common Life.  The movement originated two hundred years before the time of Erasmus under the impact of Gerard Groote (died 1340) of Deventer, who gathered a following dedicated both to the contemplative and to the active life.  They lived in a community under a regimen like that of the monks, calling for fasts, vigils, reading, and prayer, privately and in common, interspersed by long periods of silence unrelieved by boisterous levity.  The Brethren went out into the world to care for the sick and the poor and, above all, to teach children.  Sometimes they established schools of their own, sometimes planted their members here and there as teachers in existing institutions.  Their support came not from alms, but from labor, whether manual or literary, in particular from the copying of manuscripts, which continued to be in demand for some time after the invention of printing.  This was work also in which the Sisters could engage, for there were houses also of a branch for women.

          The movement called itself modern, but the modernity lay rather in the area of zeal than of dogma.  The teaching of the Church was accepted and discussion of her tenants deprecated.  Thomas á Kempis, the best-known of the Brethren, in his Imitation of Christ declared that the “Trinity is better pleased by adoration than by speculation” and he looked askance upon addiction to study.  There was thus an anti-intellectualistic strain in the movement.  The stress was placed upon piety and deportment.  The piety was marked by a heartfelt, lyrical devotion to Jesus, with undeviating endeavor to follow in his steps rather than to merge the self in the abyss of the Godhead.  The Brethren were consequently fond of the Latin mystics, Bernard and Bonaventura, rather than of the German mystics, Eckhart, Suso, and Tauler.  Nor did they conceive of piety as consisting in tearful dissolution before the wounds of Christ.  The following prayer to Jesus by Thomas á Kempis turns upon the teaching and example of the Master.

Lord Jesus Christ, who art the light, true, eternal and unchanging, who didst deign to descend to the prison of this world to dispel the shadows of human ignorance and show us the way to the land of eternal brightness, hear the prayers of my humility, and by Thine immense mercy instill into me that divine light which Thou hast promised to the world and ordered to be preached to all peoples, that I may know Thy way throughout my earthly pilgrimage.  Thou art the mirror of life, the torch of all holiness.  .   .  . Thou hast set Thyself before me as an example for living.  .  .  . Be Thou my joy, the sweetness of my soul. Dwell Thou with me and I with Thee, with all the world shut out.  Be Thou my teacher, my Master, and may Thy teaching be my wisdom.One observes that there is no reference to Christ as the propitiator.  He is the enlightener, the exemplar, the beloved companion, and the Lord.

          One of the most persistent notes in the piety of the Brethren was inwardness.  “Learn to despise the outward.  Direct thyself to the inward and thou shalt see the kingdom of God come within thee.” “Strive to withdraw thy heart from all love of the visible and transfer it to the invisible.”  Inwardness admits of no compulsion and objection to constraint militates against lifelong vows which constrain the monk to go through exercises in which the mind perchance no longer believes and to which the heart no longer responds.  To go on repeating by rote is the utter stultification of piety.  The movement at the outset dispensed with lifelong vows, but such was the pressure from the older orders, who feared lest the more flexible rule would undercut their own recruiting, that one branch of the Brethren yielded and joined the Augustinian Canons Regular.  Others, however, stoutly held out for their freedom.

          The ethical concern of the Brethren made some of them hospitable to the writings of classical antiquity.  Gerard Groote in his writings cited nineteen classical authors as over against twenty-one Christian.  He was particularly attracted to the moralists Seneca and Cicero.  The disposition to draw upon the pagan preparation for the gospel received a great impetus from the Italian Renaissance.  Rudolph Agricola, trained at Groningen in the atmosphere of the Brethren, went to Italy and was there imbued with Plutarch’s ideal of elegant diction, to be employed, however, only in the service of religion.  For Agricola the cultivation of the soul, man’s immortal component, was to be undertaken by way of erudition leading to the tranquil and unshakable seat of wisdom.  To this end he acquired proficiency not only in Latin, of course, but also in Greek and Hebrew.  Erasmus, when twelve years old, heard him speak at Deventer.  A younger man than Agricola was his friend Alexander Hegius of like aspirations.  While Agricola wrote about education, Hegius practiced it as head of the school at Deventer.  Erasmus, in his last year there as a scholar, heard him lecture on special days.  For both men Erasmus entertained a high regard and found in their example a tremendous confirmation for his own later battle on behalf of the broader study of the humanities, the more so because these men could not be reproached with any deviation from the faith, from the Church, or even from the Brethren.  Agricola was buried in the cowl of a Franciscan.

          One observes thus two strands in the tradition of the Brethren.  The one represented by á Kempis was fearful lest any sort of learning might wither the spirit.  The other, stemming from Groote and flowering in Agricola and Hegius, could appropriate the classical heritage.  The two attitudes were to conflict.  Erasmus was to champion the liberal wing while retaining essentially the piety of á Kempis. 

-from Bainton, Erasmus of Christendom, (Crossroad 1982), pp. 8-10.

New On the Nightstand

Stark, Rodney, The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force in the Western World in a Few Centuries, quoted by Felipe Assis, the Crossbridge Senior pastor, in a recent sermon.  (Felipe's sermons are extraordinarily good.  Here is a link to podcasts of them.  The one yesterday, Keep Calm, the best Easter sermon in my memory, was vintage Assis.)

Bainton, Roland H., Erasmus of Christendom.  More Reformation reading.  And because Bainton wrote it.  From Bainton's preface:

             I have long been drawn to Erasmus on a number of counts. I share his aversion to contention, his abhorrence of war, his wistful skepticism with respect to that which transcends the verifiable; at the same time I am warmed by the glow of his piety. I am convinced of the soundness of the place assigned by him to the classical alongside of the Judaeo-Christian in the heritage of the Western world. I relish his whimsicality and satire. I endorse his conviction that language is still the best medium for the transmission of thought, language not merely read but heard with cadence and rhythm as well as clarity and precision.

            Yet I should probably never have undertaken this assignment were Erasmus lacking in contemporary relevance. He is important for the dialogue which he desired never to see closed between Catholics and Protestants. He is important for the strategy of reform, violent or non-violent. He was resolved to abstain from violence alike of word and deed, but was not sure that significant reform could be achieved sine tumultu. He would neither incite nor abet it. The more intolerant grew the contenders, the more he recoiled and strove to mediate. He ended as the battered liberal. Can it ever be otherwise? This is precisely the problem of our time.