Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples

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Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples — Latinized Jacobus Faber Stapulensis — was a French humanist, editor, and biblical scholar whose work runs along two tracks that the sixteenth century would soon force apart: the recovery of ancient wisdom prized by the Renaissance, and the return to scripture that fed the Reformation. Born around 1455 in Étaples, a small port on the Picard coast, he taught philosophy in Paris, traveled three times to Italy where he met the men of the Platonic revival, and spent his last years under the protection of Marguerite de Navarre, dying at Nérac in March 1536. The two enterprises that organized his life — the ancient theology and the gospel in the vernacular — were for him a single undertaking. He never lived to see the moment when they could no longer be held in one hand.

Paris and the philosophy of the schools

From around 1490 he taught at the Collège du Cardinal Lemoine in the University of Paris, and for nearly two decades the work that made his name was the reform of how Aristotle was read. The schools had buried the philosopher under generations of commentary; the logic and the natural philosophy that students received were as much the gloss as the text. Lefèvre’s answer was the humanist instrument applied to the curriculum: clean editions, short paraphrases, descriptive introductions that carried the reader to the argument itself rather than to the dispute about the argument. He furnished full paraphrases of the Categories and the Prior and Posterior Analytics, scholia for the Topics, an introductory dialogue on the hard problems of physics, and printed manuals — epitomes and notes — that reorganized the teaching of logic, natural philosophy, ethics, and metaphysics around the recovered Greek texts. His epitome of the Sphere of Sacrobosco carried astronomy in the same clarified form. For a generation the manuals of Faber Stapulensis defined what it meant to study philosophy in Paris.

Even here the deeper preoccupation showed. Aristotle for Lefèvre was not the adversary of Plato but a station on a single road, and behind the road lay the conviction that would shape the whole first half of his career: that the wisest of the ancients had transmitted, in different idioms, one truth that pointed toward the Christian revelation.

Italy and the buried wisdom

He traveled to Italy in 1491, again in 1500, and a third time in 1507. The first journey was decisive. He sought out the leading humanists of the peninsula — Ermolao Barbaro, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Angelo Poliziano, and above all Marsilio Ficino, whose Florentine translations had remade the map of ancient philosophy. Ficino had rendered Plato into Latin, and before Plato he had translated the body of Greek treatises ascribed to Hermes Trismegistus — the Corpus Hermeticum, published as the Pimander — because he took them to record a wisdom older than Plato, indeed older than Moses, an Egyptian theology that prophesied the Trinity and the Word. This was the framework of the prisca theologia, the ancient theology: a single stream of revealed truth descending through Hermes, Orpheus, Zoroaster, Pythagoras, and Plato to its fulfillment in Christ. The assumption belonged to the wider current of Renaissance Hermetism and rested on the Neoplatonism Ficino had revived. Lefèvre returned to Paris carrying it as his own.

In 1494 he published Ficino’s Latin Hermetica in Paris, adding his own short argumenta — prefatory summaries that read each treatise as a chapter of the ancient wisdom. Around the same time he composed De magia naturali, a treatise he chose never to print, which drew on Ficino’s medical-astral cosmology in the Three Books on Life and on Pico’s interest in the Kabbalah. He kept it back; the boundary between a permitted natural magic and a forbidden one was already treacherous, and Lefèvre, who would spend his life negotiating the edge of the licit, declined to commit it to type.

His most consequential Hermetic enterprise came in 1505, when the press of Henri Estienne the elder at Paris produced a composite volume that gathered Ficino’s Latin Pimander, the Asclepius, and — printed for the first time anywhere — the Crater Hermetis of Lodovico Lazzarelli, the dialogue of regeneration in which a Christian adept professes himself Hermetic without contradiction. Lefèvre edited the volume; his correctors were Jan Schilling of Kraków and Wolfgang von Matt. By appending the Crater Hermetis he gave durable form to the strand of Renaissance Hermetism that read the ancient texts not as cosmological theory but as a script for the soul’s rebirth. The edition is the reason a modern reader can still set Lazzarelli’s editio princeps beside Ficino’s Pimander; the 1505 Paris compendium survives in digital form at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Gallica scan).

The two old corpora redated

Lefèvre’s editorial labor reached two other bodies of writing that the age believed far older than they are, and in both cases the chronology he worked inside has since collapsed.

The first was the corpus attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite, the Neoplatonic mystical theology — The Divine Names, The Mystical Theology, the celestial and ecclesiastical hierarchies — then taken for the work of the Athenian whom Paul converted on the Areopagus. To edit the Areopagite was to edit a witness of the apostolic age, a contemporary of the New Testament who had named the orders of angels and charted the soul’s ascent to the God beyond being. In 1499 Lefèvre brought out at Paris, from the press of Hopyl and Higman, the Theologia vivificans — the writings in Ambrogio Traversari’s humanist Latin — and in 1503 a fuller volume that set several Latin versions side by side. He read the Areopagite as the bridge between Neoplatonism and the gospel, the proof that the highest philosophy and the deepest theology were one. Modern scholarship dates the Dionysian corpus to around 500, the work of an anonymous Christian Neoplatonist steeped in Proclus — a forgery, Lorenzo Valla had already begun to suspect, four generations of Christian transmission younger than the apostle whose name it bears.

The second was the Hermetica themselves. The prisca theologia required that the treatises ascribed to Hermes be Egyptian and immemorially old; on that age depended their authority as a pagan prophecy of Christianity. In 1614 Isaac Casaubon, applying the linguistic stratification his teacher Scaliger had pioneered, demonstrated that the Greek of the Hermetica is post-classical koine, full of borrowings from the Septuagint and the New Testament and turns of phrase documented only in the imperial period. The texts belong to the first three Christian centuries, not to the age of Moses. Lefèvre edited Hermes Trismegistus believing him a sage of pharaonic antiquity; he was reading, without knowing it, a Greco-Egyptian author of his own era’s distant past but well within the Christian millennium. The redating did not diminish the historical force of what he and Ficino had done — the Renaissance belief in an ancient theology drove a century of European thought — but it dissolved the foundation on which they had built it.

A third corpus he handled belongs to neither category of misdating but to the same impulse of recovery. In 1514 the Paris press of Josse Bade produced, in three folio volumes, Lefèvre’s edition of the Opera of Nicholas of Cusa — the De docta ignorantia, the De coniecturis, and the rest of the cardinal’s speculative theology of the coincidence of opposites. Lefèvre’s edition remained the standard collected works of Cusanus until the twentieth century. Through it the learned-ignorance tradition reached the French humanists, and through Cusanus Lefèvre absorbed a theology that could hold the infinite God and the human mind in one frame without strain.

The turn to scripture

The second track of his life was the Bible, and it grew out of the first. The same philological discipline that produced clean Aristotle and clean Hermes turned, after 1507, on the sacred text. His Quincuplex Psalterium of 1509 set five Latin versions of the Psalms in parallel columns — the Gallican, Roman, Hebrew, Old Latin, and a conciliated text — so that the reader could weigh the renderings against one another and reach, through them, the sense of the Hebrew beneath. It was textual criticism in the service of devotion, the apparatus of the humanist editor laid upon the book the Church sang daily. The instinct ran parallel to that of Erasmus, whose Greek New Testament of 1516 would put the same philological pressure on the Latin scripture; the two corresponded and at points sparred — notably over a verse in Hebrews about Christ and the angels — as the leading textual humanists of their northern generation.

In 1512 came the commentary on the fourteen epistles of Paul, with a corrected Latin text beside the Vulgate. There, before Martin Luther had nailed anything to any door, Lefèvre argued from Paul that the sinner is justified by faith and grace and not by works — that righteousness is God’s gift, not the wage of human merit. He drew the conclusion as an exegete reading his author closely, not as a man breaking with Rome; but the Paris faculty of theology marked the reading, and the marking would harden into suspicion. The same years brought a sharper collision. Between 1517 and 1519 Lefèvre published two studies arguing, on philological grounds, that the Mary of Bethany, Mary Magdalene, and the unnamed penitent woman of Luke’s gospel were three distinct persons — against the composite single Magdalene fixed by Pope Gregory the Great in the sixth century and embedded in the liturgy and the cult. Noël Bédier, the formidable syndic of the Paris faculty, and John Fisher, bishop of Rochester, wrote against him; in 1521 the Sorbonne condemned the position. The lesson was unmistakable: the humanist’s right to correct the text had collided with the Church’s settled reading, and the Church’s reading held.

Meaux, the French Bible, and the closing years

In 1521 Bishop Guillaume Briçonnet of Meaux gathered around himself a circle of scholars and preachers bent on renewing the diocese through scripture — the so-called Cénacle de Meaux, which ran from 1521 to 1525 and drew in a young Guillaume Farel among others. Lefèvre joined it, and in 1523 was named Briçonnet’s vicar-general. The program of Meaux made the printed word of God in the people’s language its center, and Lefèvre supplied it: in 1523 he published a French translation of the New Testament, contemporary with Luther’s German version, and by 1530 the whole French Bible, printed in a single volume at Antwerp. A revised edition followed in 1534. For the first time a French reader who knew no Latin could hold the entire scripture in hand. Lefèvre had carried the humanist’s confidence in the recovered text all the way to its most radical consequence — the gospel placed directly before the unlearned.

The consequence was dangerous. When the Parlement of Paris summoned him on suspicion of heresy, he fled to Strasbourg in the late summer of 1525. He was recalled by Francis I in 1526, made royal librarian at Blois and tutor to the king’s children, and from 1531 lived under the protection of the king’s sister Marguerite, now queen of Navarre, at Nérac. There he died in March 1536, in communion with Rome, having submitted where pressed and never having left the Church into which he was born.

Scholarship and the texts

The standard modern account of Lefèvre’s life and intentions is Eugene F. Rice, Jr., who edited his prefatory and dedicatory writings in The Prefatory Epistles of Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples and Related Texts (Columbia University Press, 1972) — the indispensable documentary base for everything Lefèvre put into print. The Hermetic and prisca theologia side of his work is set in its widest frame by D. P. Walker, The Ancient Theology: Studies in Christian Platonism from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century (Duckworth, 1972), and by Walker’s earlier Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella (Warburg Institute, 1958). The biography is treated in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s article Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples, with full attention to the philosophical manuals and the Aristotelian project.

The primary texts survive in digitized early editions. The 1505 Paris compendium that carries Ficino’s Pimander, the Asclepius, and the editio princeps of Lazzarelli’s Crater Hermetis — the most consequential of Lefèvre’s Hermetic imprints — is online at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Gallica ark:/12148/bpt6k538049), with a parallel copy at the Munich Digitization Center (MDZ bsb10150775). The philological case that undid the chronology Lefèvre worked inside is laid out in the classic study of Casaubon by Mark Pattison, Isaac Casaubon, 1559–1614 (Longmans, 1875), where the Hermetica argument occupies the sixth chapter. The critical recovery of the rebirth strand of Renaissance Hermetism that Lefèvre’s 1505 volume preserved is the work of Wouter J. Hanegraaff and Ruud M. Bouthoorn, Lodovico Lazzarelli (1447–1500): The Hermetic Writings and Related Documents (Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2005), which prints the Crater Hermetis with translation and commentary. The Mead English Corpus Hermeticum — the text Lefèvre helped transmit, in its early twentieth-century English dress — is hosted in the library.

The moment that closed

He belonged to a brief opening in which one scholar could pursue the buried wisdom of the ancients and the plain text of the gospel as a single labor. The same hand that printed Hermes Trismegistus as a prophet of Christ printed the Psalter in five columns and the New Testament in French; the same conviction — that the recovered text carries the truth, and that the editor’s discipline is a form of piety — drove both. Within a few years of his death the confessional lines would harden, and the combination he embodied would become suspect on every side: too much ancient theology for the reformers, too much vernacular scripture for Rome. Lefèvre kept the Hermetic editions and the French Bible in the same working life, submitted to the Church when it pressed, and seems never to have felt the strain a later century would.

→ In the library: The Corpus Hermeticum (Mead) — I. Poemandres

→ Related: Marsilio Ficino · Hermes Trismegistus · Pseudo Dionysius The Areopagite · Prisca Theologia · Renaissance Hermetism · The Reformation · Corpus Hermeticum · Neoplatonism · Isaac Casaubon · Lodovico Lazzarelli · Nicholas Of Cusa · Erasmus · Martin Luther · New Testament · Psalms