DR May-3

 Passage (Word Count: 594 | Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 17)

Erasmus of Rotterdam, the eminent Renaissance scholar and educator, begins his polemical treatise The Ciceronian (1528) with a portrayal of a character named Nosoponus, whose writing process has devolved into utter dysfunction. Structured as a dialogue, the treatise stages two mature interlocutors, Bulephorus and Hypologus, attempting to dissuade Nosoponus from his paralyzing obsession with stylistic perfection. Nosoponus confesses that even the composition of a simple letter—merely requesting the return of borrowed books—entails an excruciating ordeal of endless writing and rewriting. He reveals that his writing necessitates such fierce concentration that he must undertake it nocturnally, when the world lies dormant, free from distraction. Despite this, his perfectionism leads to the astonishing consequence that the formulation of a single sentence can consume an entire night, a sentence revisited obsessively until dissatisfaction drives him to abandon the effort altogether.

This predicament is hardly alien to the modern writer. Who has not agonized over the precise phrasing of a banal email? Contemporary technology offers a facile resolution: large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-4 provide instantaneous, well-phrased suggestions. When Nosoponus’s request was entered into GPT-4, the model produced a casual, effective message within seconds. Yet Erasmus’s own era was not devoid of tools for facilitating eloquence. A humanist education, modeled on Erasmian principles, trained students to generate writing that was rapid, articulate, and rhetorically dexterous. François Rabelais, Erasmus’s contemporary, perceived these compositional methods as akin to automation. His understanding of humanist pedagogy suggests a pre-modern precursor to LLMs: systems for the generative production of text that, while efficient, potentially attenuate language’s ethical and political resonance.

Rabelais—monk, physician, secretary, and spy—is chiefly remembered for his satirical quintet concerning the adventures of Gargantua and Pantagruel, aristocratic giants maneuvering through sixteenth-century France. In Gargantua (1534), the benefits and detriments of a humanist education receive pronounced scrutiny. Those who undergo such training acquire an ornate and distinctive mode of expression, but their utterances serve primarily to parade their erudition rather than to communicate substantive meaning. When a character declares, “No more just cause for pain can arise among men than if, from where they should in all fairness expect gracious benevolence, they receive travail and injury,” the reader is prompted not to contemplate the moral gravity of betrayal, but to admire the rhetorical flourish. GPT-4’s modern equivalent—“It is profoundly disheartening when those entrusted with our care or respect instead subject us to mistreatment”—is similarly impressive, yet sterile, its affectivity subordinate to its linguistic competence.

Both Erasmus and Nosoponus composed in Latin, the lingua franca of the learned, acquired through the painstaking emulation of classical authors. Renaissance debates centered on which Latin stylist to emulate, though Cicero’s primacy remained uncontested. Ciceronians adhered strictly to Cicero alone, while eclectics, like Erasmus, drew from a multiplicity of models. Over the dialogue’s course, Bulephorus persuades Nosoponus toward eclecticism by highlighting that even Cicero himself was a voracious reader who would, were he alive, adapt his style to modern exigencies—thus rendering slavish imitation anathema to true Ciceronianism.

The commonplace book—an essential pedagogical instrument—served divergent purposes. For eclectics, it was a lexical repository, much like a thesaurus, while for Ciceronians, it became a site of anxious authentication. Nosoponus’s writing was crippled by his insistence on validating every lexical and grammatical choice against Cicero’s corpus, rendering linguistic spontaneity impossible. Even verb conjugations required verification. Erasmus’s educational goal was to instill the very fluency Nosoponus lacked. His students practiced composing letters and speeches from the perspectives of mytho-historical figures, cultivating adaptability, empathy, and eloquence—prefiguring the prompt-based structure of today’s LLMs.

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Difficult Words and Meanings:

• Polemical – strongly critical or controversial writing or speech

• Interlocutors – participants in a dialogue

• Dexterous – skillful, particularly in the use of words or hands

• Attenuate – to reduce in force or effect

• Erudition – deep, scholarly knowledge

• Affectivity – the capacity to elicit emotional response

• Exigencies – urgent needs or demands

• Anathema – something detested or shunned

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