Communication of Linguistic Idioms in Eneas Sylvius Piccolomini's Letters

applyparastyle “fig//caption/p[1]” parastyle “FigCapt” Mediaevistik 32 . 2019 213 2020 Daniel Nodes 00 Communication of Linguistic Idioms in Eneas Sylvius Piccolomini’s Letters 00 213 Abstract: Eneas Silvius Piccolomini was a prolific writer in all phases of his life. His writing, 226 influenced by the devotion to classical style of Renaissance humanism, has nevertheless been described as “falling below the highest humanistic standards” and even as “frequently incor- rect.” Piccolomini’s style, moreover, includes lexical and syntactical practices of the medieval 2020 scholastics that have at times been thought to be the collective object of banishment by the humanists. Those negative assessments acquire more validity when Piccolomini’s style is jud- ged strictly by the exaggerated standards of classical purity which many humanists claimed. Piccolomini’s hybrid style, however, was effective and at times even necessary; and nowhere better can the effectiveness of his merging of Latin idioms be seen than in the letters he wrote between his early secular career and brief reign as Pope Pius II. This essay examines the La- tinity of Piccolomini’s detailed epistolary reports on the Council of Basel composed in 1450, and on his mission to Bohemia in 1451. Just as his actual mission that year blended secular and religious agendas, the style of his letters that reflect on the Council and its aftermath skillfully achieves not only a combination but a communication between classical and ecclesiastical La- tin vocabulary, sentence structures, and concepts. Cicero began his De finibus bonorum et malorum by reprehending at length those of his fellow Romans who expressed contempt for their own Latin language (qui se Latina scripta dicunt contemnere) because, as he described the ethos of his day, for the most important topics they were not impressed by books written in their native Latin (in gravissimis rebus non delectet eos sermo patrius).1 Cicero’s rebuke of those detractors and attendant championing of Latin were so successful that he became the most important model of Latinity. From a career that bequeathed speeches, letters and philosophical treatises, often in an innovative form of Latin, it has become common- place to observe, for example, that “Cicero’s influence on Latin prose was so great that subsequent prose—not only in Latin but in later vernacular languages up to the nineteenth century—was either a reaction against or a return to his style.”2 Yet despite the general validity of that profile, the living practice of composing in Latin was more complex even among writers who declared devotion to the Cice- ronian idiom. To judge by the standards of Renaissance humanism, at least as they were professed, Cicero’s influence on Latin was so great that in 1529 Erasmus in the Ciceronianus felt the need, like Cicero, to rebuke his contemporaries; but this time the shadow fell on those who expressed contempt for any style other than that modeled on Cicero. The Ciceronian Latin that was sought after comprised an overall style, but often “came down to no more than limiting oneself to the vocabulary of the extant works of Cicero,” as H. C. Gottoff observed. Gotoff noted also that “Erasmus was too good a Latinist to ignore the stylistic failure of the doctrinaire Ciceronians, too inte- The online edition of this publication is available open access and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC-BY 4.0 license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ © 2020 Daniel Nodes https://doi.org/10.3726/med.2019.01.09 214 Mediaevistik 32 . 2019 rested in communicating to restrict his style in so slavish and perfunctory a manner.”3 In that context, on the one hand, one appreciates Erasmus for the humorous portrayal of so limiting a view of Latin as held by his character Nosopon, who “for seven whole years touched nothing but Ciceronian books” in order that he might eliminate from his own vocabulary every un-Ciceronian phrase. Erasmus, on the other hand, was not alone in cultivating an expansion, or rather, an enrichment, of Latin by transcending Ciceronian limits, of necessity even to include the Latin of the Christian centuries. For all the just tribute to Erasmus, the humanist enrichment of Latin through the blending of vocabulary and syntax from various ages had long been practiced. This essay examines an instance of an effective hybrid Latin style in two important letters by Eneas Sylvius Piccolomini (1405‒1464). Piccolomini’s career in the crossroad of literature and politics, like that of many of his contemporaries, is well studied.4 Here, however, the interest is on another crossroad, focusing on his literary output. Eneas’s style is here characterized by what the title of this essay names the communication of linguistic idioms. ‘Communication of idioms’ is a technical expression borrowed from early Christian theology. In a christological context, communicatio idiomatum (ἀ ν τ ί δ ο σ ι ς ἰ δ ι ωμ ά τ ω ν), refers to descriptions of the incarnate Christ as son of God wherein the properties of the Divine Word can be ascribed to the man Jesus Christ, and the properties of the man Christ can be predicated of Christ the Divine Word. That meaning of the phrase is based on the mystical doctrine of the oneness of the person of Jesus Christ subsisting in two natures, divine and human, which is a central tenet of Christian dogma. Thus, in that Christian tradition it is proper to speak in terms of God dying on the Cross, for example, and the Virgin Mary as the mother not just of the man Jesus, but as the mother of God (mater Dei, Θ ε ο τ ό κ ο ς) and not just the mother of the man Jesus Christ (Χ ρ ι σ τ ο τ ό κ ο ς). The latter epithet, favored by the Nes- torians, was formally rejected at the Council of Ephesus (431) precisely because it was considered as erroneously failing to preserve the union of the two natures in Christ, which became formally known as the hypostatic union (451). In the Renaissance and Reformation, the theological concept of communication of idioms was debated as to whether the phrase described what was just a manner of speaking or an actual manner of being; but the basic concept of linguistic interchange resulting in the construction of terms like Θ ε ο τ ό κ ο ς was understood by all sides in the debate. In the present study, that concept of merged vocabulary and shared allusions is used to describe Eneas Sylvius Piccolomini’s Latin. The idioms in this case are two repre- sentative forms of Latin which have been contrasted with each other by many different pairings over a long history: classical Latin vs. ecclesiastical, humanist vs. scholastic, Ciceronian vs. Thomistic, pagan vs. Christian, Roman vs. biblical. In Piccolomini’s writings, the communication is not only the presence of both forms of Latin vocabulary and style, but also the use of one form of diction in contexts typically belonging to the realm of the other form of diction. Observing this phenomenon in Piccolomini allows his life and literary output to be seen increasingly in connection with Roman humanism, a phrase used to describe the humanism of those who were clergymen and who supported the papal monarchy and Catholic orthodoxy.5 While theories of the essence of Renaissance culture abound in variety, ever since Jules Michelet and Jacob Burckhardt in the 1850s emphasized Mediaevistik 32 . 2019 215 the rise of individualism and ‘the concept of man’ through the recovery of classical civilization, and historians of the mid-twentieth century like Theodore Mommsen and Edwin Panofsky, and, at the beginning of the tweny-first century, Anthony Levi, emphasized the rise of secular states, most discussions of Renaissance humanism point to distinctions between humanism and the medieval culture that preceded it.6 The establishment of a new educational ethos directed toward participation in civic institutions and served by the rhetoric of classicizing Latin, principally the language of Cicero, has been seen not only to emphasize a revival of classical Latin, but a break with the medieval past, to repudiate what was considered medieval corruption of the classical idiom that exhibited poor grammar and weak style, and a boorish jargon, en- listed to construct fanciful proofs. Further, that dichotomy is not a modern invention but is based on what the humanists themselves said and wrote. It is at the heart of what Erasmus mocks in the Ciceronianus. Humanist testimonials of devotion to classical Latin are especially prevalent in the chronicles the humanists wrote of their own movement, especially in a genre of writings celebrating the works and literary achievements of contemporaries, known as the De viris illustribus tradition. Eneas Sylvius Piccolomini himself wrote vigorously about the ideal of Ciceronian Latin in his own De viris illustribus, which he worked throughout the 1440s until 1450.7 As Patrick Baker has observed recently, for example, Piccolomini offered an encapsulated history of Latin style’s rise and fall in his praise of a humanist colleague of his, Leonardo Bruni (1445‒1450), whose Latin he praised as reviving the ancients: Ab ipsis etenim lingue latine repertoribus ornatus dicendi et studia litterarum continuo creverunt usque ad tempora Ciceronis, ubi vere plenitudinem acceperunt nec amplius crescere potuerunt, cum jam essent in culmine. Manserunt igitur postea per plures annos ac usque ad Jeronimum atque Gregorium viguerunt, non tamen absque minutione, exin perierunt funditus; nec enim post illa tempora qui ornate scripserunt reperitur. [From its very founders, the Latin language developed continually in the elegance of its expression and literary study up to the time of Cicero, when it achieved its true fullness and could not possibly have evolved further, since it was already at its apex.

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