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, in Picardy, he taught philosophy in Paris, traveled to Italy where he met the circle around the Platonic revival, and spent his last years under the protection of Marguerite de Navarre, dying at Nérac in 1536.

His early labor was editorial in the humanist manner: clean texts, printed, freed of medieval accretion. He produced commentaries on Aristotle meant to strip away scholastic commentary and reach the philosopher directly; he edited the writings attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite, the Neoplatonic mystical theology then taken for the work of Paul’s Athenian convert; and he brought out editions of the Hermetic writings, the body of Greek texts ascribed to Hermes Trismegistus that Ficino had lately translated into Latin. In doing so Lefèvre worked inside the assumption of his age — that a single ancient wisdom, older than Plato, ran beneath these scattered texts and pointed toward the Christian truth. Scholarship later dismantled that chronology: the Hermetica are now dated to the early Christian centuries, and the Dionysian corpus to around 500. Lefèvre edited them believing them far older than they are.

The second track was the Bible. His Quincuplex Psalterium of 1509 set five Latin versions of the Psalms side by side; his 1512 commentary on the Pauline epistles argued, before Luther’s break, that the sinner is justified by faith and grace rather than by works — a reading that drew suspicion from the Paris faculty of theology. In the 1520s he joined the reforming circle gathered at Meaux under Bishop Guillaume Briçonnet, and produced a French translation of the New Testament in 1523 and of the whole Bible by 1530, putting scripture into the vernacular for lay readers.

How to place him is genuinely contested. Protestant historians long claimed him as a forerunner; Catholic ones noted that he never left the Church, submitted where pressed, and died in communion with Rome. Both descriptions hold. He belonged to the brief moment when a scholar could pursue the buried wisdom of the ancients and the plain text of the gospel as one undertaking, before confessional lines hardened and made the combination suspect. He kept the Hermetic editions and the French Bible in the same working life, 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