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ERASMUS' TROUBLES WITH HISTORY AND HOW HE OVERCAME THEM WITH THE HELP OF THE BIBLE

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Domanski J.

Odrodzenie i Reformacja w Polsce

2006

vol. 50

11-27

History and philosophy differ from each other in their subject matter and in the way they communicate what each of them says about it. While history expresses itself most adequately by means of stories, narration; philosophy, by means of conceptual distinctions, definitions and syllogisms. This difference can be described by saying that philosophy deals with ontic existence while history is concerned with gignetic existence and that this difference accounts for their different language.However, in practice, nothing prevents a historian from using general concepts and their definitions just as nothing prevents a philosopher from narrating single, contingent facts. A similar difference and similarity exist in a specific way also in Hellenistic Jewish thought, and later in Christian thought. As a literary message, the Old and the New Testament are mostly a history, but their main contents are of an identical, or very similar character to the nature of philosophy. This is why they were translated into the language of Platonic and Stoic philosophy by Philo of Alexandria.The ancient and, even more clearly, the medieval exegesis of the Bible transformed the allegoric presentation into a rigorous conceptual system. This was favoured by the increasingly strong dominance of philosophy in medieval intellectual culture. The Renaissance humanists of the 14th-16th centuries raised the rank of history. Some of them extended their meta-historical reflections to the Bible. One of the most important among them was Erasmus of Rotterdam, a humanist and also a theologian.Having made the Bible the focus of his theological and humanistic works, Erasmus could not avoid the Biblical thought and conveyance structures which were typical of history. He also realised that the thought structures proper to history were not a sufficiently adequate tool for the Bible. It was in allegory that he tried to find the conceptual and philosophical 'generality' which was lacking in these structures, hoping that with its help he would be able to save the concreteness of the personal character of the Christian message and avoid scholastic conceptualisation and systematisation. The author of the article, which is a fragment of a still unfinished book 'Aristotle's Philosophy and the Scientific Status of Historiography', analyses anew Erasmus' humanistic and theological thoughts on the Bible as history.

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1 Odrodzenie i Reformacja w Polsce

1 Domanski J.

1 2006

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ERASMUS' TROUBLES WITH HISTORY AND HOW HE OVERCAME THEM WITH THE HELP OF THE BIBLE