![]() ![]() 8Įver since Renaudet’s authoritative examination of Lefèvre and his students in Préréforme et humanisme (1916), historians of the Reformation have known that Fabrists held the liberal arts of the trivium and quadrivium in high esteem, and that they shared the metaphysical fascinations of Nicholas of Cusa and Ramon Llull. 7 As late as 1521 Lefèvre’s protégé Gérard Roussel, the Meaux preacher who would later become bishop of Oloron (to Calvinist chagrin), published an edition and commentary on Boethius’ Arithmetica. All the while, students and printer friends such as Henri Estienne and Josse Bade were printing their earlier mathematical works, sometimes in new editions, sometimes simply as reprints. This period seems to have been the height of Bovelles’ interest in a mathematising philosophy, applied also to theology. In 1516 Lefèvre edited an arrangement of the two major Latin translations of Euclid’s Elements, and in the following year, he expanded his introduction to astronomy, along with the commentary of Clichtove. But although Lefèvre, Clichtove, and Bovelles had published most intensively on natural philosophy and mathematics in the 1490s and before 1505, when Lefèvre published a new edition of the Corpus Hermetica, their biblical interests did not immediately eclipse their mathematical interests. Three years later, he published a commentary on the New Testament letters of the Apostle Paul, which established Lefèvre’s reputation as a humanist interpreter of scripture and later earned the polemical scrutiny of his younger friend Erasmus. In 1508 Lefèvre followed his patron Guillaume Briçonnet across Paris to the Benedictine abbey of Saint-Germain-des Prés, where he prepared the exegetical projects that have defined the rest of his life for most historians, beginning with his Quincuplex Psalterium (1509). 6 This reputation survived their departure from the Collège du Cardinal Lemoine, where they were preeminent among the regent arts masters. To their contemporaries, Lefèvre and his closer students Josse Clichtove and Charles de Bovelles were known as mathematicians, as well as philosophers and theologians. 4 Lefèvre was more than willing, having already edited much of Campanus’ version but under time constraints, he shared the project as he often did, with one of his students, Michael Pontanus. 3 In 1514 François had asked Lefèvre to prepare an edition of Euclid – presumably because of recent controversies over the main medieval translation of Campanus and the new humanist translation by the Venetian Bartolomeo Zamberti. 2įrançois Briçonnet was Lefèvre’s former pupil and a cousin to the abbot of Saint-Germain, Guillaume Briçonnet, who had just been made bishop of Meaux and who would, a few years later, place Lefèvre at the centre of the first experiment with evangelical reform. Lefèvre’s readers would have recognised this as the wisdom of Egypt known to Moses, the earliest inspired author of the Bible. 1Indeed, Lefèvre continued, the part of philosophy called geometry was based on Phoenician and Egyptian wisdom in deepest antiquity. ![]() This method of doing philosophy was the most ancient, existing even before Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle it should be considered more venerable because of its antiquity. I ask you: what analogies could be quicker, purer, or more abstract for raising one up to divine things, than mathematical characters? It scarcely takes mental effort, as anyone knows who has read the Analysis of Numbers and On the Triad of Odo as well as books by Nicholas of Cusa such as On Learned Ignorance, On Conjectures, On the Beryl, and others like them. Indeed, one truth shines forth in all things, living in light inaccessible, and by this light one can reach the truth as if climbing certain steps-especially if one knows the method of analogies and assurrections. ![]()
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