TIME: BEyOND LATE ANTIQUITy | 21ally, with the Protestant Reformation) a revolution in European thought^6 —
more so than Thomas Aquinas’s proving in 1272 that the Book of causes was
by the late Platonist Proclus not Aristotle,^7 or Isaac Casaubon’s demonstra-
tion in 1614 that “Hermes Trismegistus” was no Eg yptian coeval of Moses,
but a cover for Greek writers of the first Christian centuries.^8
Exiled scholars from Constantinople played a part in this dazzling Re-
naissance reevaluation of Antiquity; but it was far more a Latin than a Greek
achievement, while its protagonists are the direct ancestors of our own schol-
arly world. If one were to pick a single individual as exemplifying this catho-
lic and critical approach to both the Greco- Roman and Christian traditions,
it might be Erasmus of Rotterdam (d. 1536), of whom it has recently been
said that
Erasmus’ return ad fontes is largely free of nostalgia for lost worlds....
[He] has the best claim of any Renaissance or “early modern” man to
have anticipated our latter- day science of “Late Antiquity.”^9
This heady mixture of Platonism and patristics^10 did not suffice the schol-
ars of the Renaissance and Reformation, unless accompanied by a hearty
helping of ecclesiastical history. Catholics such as Cesare Baronius (d. 1607)
or Le Nain de Tillemont (d. 1698) asserted Rome’s traditions and privileges,
Protestants such as Baronius’s critic Casaubon (d. 1614) burrowed behind
the imperial Papacy of the fifth and subsequent centuries to excavate a more
pristine, authentic state of affairs. Before the eighteenth century, only a very
few were interested in writing secular histories of any period of Antiquity.^11
For that to happen, and in particular for something nonconfessional and rec-
ognizable to us as late antique studies to emerge, a greater distance from
Christianity was needed. Still in Gibbon the strife of Catholics and Protes-
tants rumbles constantly through the footnotes, while the critical and ratio-
nal historian flatters himself that he may “poise the balance with philosophic
6 M. Cortesi, “Valla, Laurentius,” in H. R. Balz and others (eds), Theologische Realenzyklopädie
(Berlin 1977–2007) 34.500–504; L. Valla (tr. G. W. Bowersock), On the Donation of Constantine (Cam-
bridge, Mass. 2007).
7 H. D. Saffrey (ed.), Thomas d’Aquin, Super Librum de causis expositio (Paris 2002^2 ).
8 A. Grafton, “Protestant versus Prophet: Isaac Casaubon on Hermes Trismegistus,” Journal of the
Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 46 (1983) 78–93 (noting, 86–87, that Casaubon was not the first to
express skepticism about Trismegistus).
9 M. Vessey, “Cities of the mind: Renaissance views of early Christian culture and the end of Antiq-
uity,” in P. Rousseau (ed.), A companion to late Antiquity (Chichester 2009) 57; cf. id., “Jerome and the
Jeromanesque,” in A. Cain and J. Lössl (eds), Jerome of Stridon (Farnham 2009) 229–31. Gibbon made
Erasmus “the father of rational theolog y” as well: 54: 3.438 n. 38.
10 Now renamed, especially in North America, “early Christian studies,” registering a decline in
philological as much as a rise in socio- anthropological competence.
11 Momigliano, Sesto contributo [1:25] 254–55. For some early accounts of late Antiquity, see A.
Demandt, Die Spätantike (Munich 2007^2 ) XV–XVII.