Renaissance humanism

I naively assumed that no(prenominal) of this would be controversial, and I was quite unprep argond for the hostility it provoked among some legates to the congress, chiefly from Northern Europe, who stand for what I came to perceive as the Lutheran Establishwork forcet. This group was concerned to insist on the total originality of Luther and the unequivoc onlyy Ger reality Origins of the Reformation. The paper would, I think, be to a greater extent generally accepted today . It was jump promulgated in Luther and the Dawn of the Modern Era Papers for the Fourth International Congress for Luther Research, De.H. A. Barman, Studies in the memorial of Christian Thought, Volvo. 8 (Elided E. J. Brills, 1974), up. 127-149. It is reprinted here(predicate) by permission of the publisher . Since the peculiar mixture of responsibility and assumption in the title of my paper result scarcely seduce escaped the nonice of this distinguished audience, I feel some consider to explain at t he out adapt that it represents an assign custodyt on the part of those who think our meeting.The significance of the worrys to which it points is suggested by the great historians who strike grappled with it in the past, albeit (a fact that should constitute some matter of a warning) with somewhat impertinent results, among them Michelle, Diluted, and Throttles. l Its practical importance lies in the need of most of us to place our much limited inclusions in some broader historic frame put to work we must at that placefore reconsider, from ? 226 ? time to time, the relationship betwixt rebirth and Reformation.In en diversityle of this, the subject has recently received little systematic attention, and many of us are still potential to rely, when we approach it, on unexamined and obsolete stereotypes. Obviously I cannot hope to remedy this state of affairs in a brief paper. however the progress of conversion studies in recent decades invites a reassessment of this unequ ivocal job, and I offer these remarks as an essay intended to stimulate further concussion. What has chiefly inhibited large generalization has been the extension and refinement of our knowledge, and with it a growth both in specialization and in humility.Thus we are increa crimegly reluctant to make broad pronouncements about either the conversion or the Reformation, much little about both at once. For as scholars we are divided not only amongst renascence and Reformation, or between Italy and Northern Europe crimson within these categories most of us are specialists who would lead competence only in a particular aspect of reincarnation Florence or Venice, in one and only(a) phase or another of metempsychosis manism, in Machiavelli or Erasmus, in later scholasticism or the history of piety, in Luther or Calvin or the sects.Under these cultivates few students of the metempsychosis have cared to look as far-off as the Reformation and although Reformation scholars have b een somewhat b gray-headeder, they have rarely pursued the question of Renaissance antecedents farther than northern sympatheticism. Humanism is, hence, the one subject that has recently advance forays into the problem of this paper plainly although Barren, Devour, Spits, Libeling, and especially Charles Trinkets, among others, have made valuable intrusions to discussion,2 the problem is still with us, primarily, I think, because we have not amply made up our minds about the meaning of Renaissance humanism.A result of this difficulty has been a tendency to concentrate special attention on Erasmus as a occupystone for the Renaissance, a role for which?for reasons that will start later in this paper?I think he is not exclusively suited. It is, however, one beak of the complexity of our subject that we cannot approach the question of the relationship between Renaissance and Reformation without somehow first coming to terms with the implications of humanism. I should like to d o so, however, obliquely rather than flat.It seems to me that although humanism, which assumed a revolution of forms as it passed through successive stages and was influenced by differing local conditions, was not identical with the much(prenominal) profound tendencies of Renaissance elaboration, it was nevertheless(prenominal) often probable to give them notable aspect, and for reasons that were not accidental hardly directly connect to the rhetorical tradition whatever their ?227 ? differences in other respects, most recent interpretations of Renaissance humanism have at least identified it with a revival of rhetoric. What has been less generally recognized is the deeper significance of this revival. The major reason is, I think, that in our time the term rhetoric has become largely pejorative we are inclined to couple it with the adjective mere. But for the Renaissance there was nothing shallow about rhetoric. root word on a set of profound assumptions about the te mper, competence, and destiny of man, rhetoric gave expression to the deepest tendencies of Renaissance polish, tendencies by no meaner confined to men clearly identifiable as humanists, nor invariably fully expressed by men who have generally been considered humanists.I shall try in this paper to describe these tendencies, which seem to me to have exerted intolerable pressures on fundamental elements in the medieval beneathstanding of Christianity. And I will suggest that similar tendencies get up the view of the great Protestant Reformers. Thus the significance of Protestantism in the development of European culture lies in the fact that it accepted the religious consequences of these Renaissance tendencies and was prepared to apply them to the understanding of the Gospel.From this standpoint the Reformation was the theological fulfillment of the Renaissance. I Fundamental to the cultural movements of the Renaissance was a gradual accumulation of assortment and semipoliti cal changes an economy increasingly dependent on commerce rather than agriculture a political grammatical construction composed of assertive particular powers and a society dominated by educated laymen who were increasingly rough under clerical direction and increasingly aggressive in pressing their own claims to dignity and self-determination.A commercialised economy and the more and more openly uncoordinated conduct of governance supplied the complaisant base for a parvenu day-dream of mans place in the realness, and of the world itself. Social experience rooted in the pour down had perhaps encouraged a intellect of broad, natural regularities ultimately responsive to cosmic forces and inhibiting to a sense of the significance of change but the life of a merchant comm agreement and the ambitious operations of self-directed rulers made all experience contingent on the interaction between unpredictable forces and the practical courtesy and energies of men.Under these con ditions the possibility of cosmic fellowship seemed remote, but in any case of little relevance to human affairs and the obvious rule of change in the empirical world encouraged efforts at its intuition and in the end ? 228 ? stimulated the awake(predicate)ness of history, that peculiarly Hebraic and Christian?as opposed to Hellenic or Hellenic?contribution to the Western consciousness.Meanwhile new political realities and the claims of laymen depraved the hierarchical designings that had defined the internal structure of the old unified order of the cosmos, within which the affairs of this world had been assigned their proper place. 4 It will to a fault be useful to observe at this point that these developments were by no meaner confined to Italy I will touch briefly at a later point on the implications of this fact for the Renaissance problem.It is not altogether wrong to emphasize the positive consequences of these developments which, by freeing human activity from any con nection with ultimate patterns of order, liberated an exuberance that found expression in the various dimensions of Renaissance creativity. Bureaucrats insight that the autonomy of politics converted the prince into an artist of sorts may require modification yet the new situation made all human arrangements potentially creative in a sense hardly possible so massive as the basic principles of e genuinely activity were deduced from universal principles.The whim of the state as a work of art points to the general process of colonization and reminds us that the culture of the Renaissance extended far beyond its brilliant art and literature, and was perhaps even more significant in its implications than in its accomplishments. It had, however, another and darker side. It detain on the destruction of the sense of a definable relationship between man and ultimate realities. It divide his connection with absolute principles of order, not so much by denying their existence as by rejecti ng their accessibility to the human understanding.It deprived him of a traditional conception of himself as a be with distinct and nonionised faculties attuned to the similarly organized structure of an unchanging, and in this sense dependable, universe. Above all, therefore, it left(a) him both alone in a mysterious world of unpredictable and often hostile forces, and at the same time personally responsible in the most radical sense for his own ultimate destiny. For he was now left without reliable principles and? because the directive claims of the church service besides depended heavily on the old conceptions?reliable agencies of guidance.These darker aspects of Renaissance culture eventually squired, therefore, a re formula of Christian belief, and we shall now examine them a bit more closely. Renaissance thought has sometimes been represented as a reassertion of ancient rationalism against the supernaturalism of the Middle Ages. The formulation is, of course, both inaccu rate and misleading. In the thirteenth century some smart leaders had been notably hospitable to Greek philosophy, and had tried to coordinate it with revelation.But ? 229 ? it was precisely the possibility of such coordination that Renaissance culture?insofar as it differed from what had preceded it?characteristically denied in this sense Renaissance thought was less rationalistic (if not necessarily less rational) than that of the Middle Ages. In fact it was inclined to distinguish between realms, between ultimate truths altogether trackless to mans intellect, and the knowledge man needed to get along in this world, which turned out to be fitting for his means.Thus the Renaissance attack on scholasticism had a larger implication as healthy as a specific target it implied, and occasionally led to, the rejection of all systematic philosophy. From Patriarch, through Salutation and Villa, to Machiavelli, Pompano, ND the Venetians of the later Renaissance, the leaders of Renaissan ce thought rejected any effort to ground human censure or action on metaphysics and at the same time they insisted on the autonomy of the various dimensions of human concern and the relativity of truth to the practical requirements of the human condition.In this sense, although truth was robbed of some grandeur, it was also made more human and if Aristotle was less and less respected as a vehicle of eternal wisdom, he could be all the more admired as a man. 5 Under such conditions philosophy could evidently head nothing to deity indeed, its virtual effects were likely to be adverse since it encouraged malice and pride. connect to the attack on metaphysical speculation was an attack on pecking order, which rested ultimately on metaphysically based conceptions of the internal structure of all reality.The repudiation of hierarchy was most profoundly expressed in Nicholas of Cusss conception of the infinite, which made every entity equally distant from?and thus equally near to?God6 a similar impulse perhaps lurks behind Villas rejection of Pseudo-Dionysus. 7 But partly because the formulations of Susan smacked overly such of metaphysics, partly because the problem of hierarchy was peculiarly related to social change, the attack on hierarchy was likely to receive more overtly social expression.It took a general form in the effort to substitute a high-powered conception of nobility through virtue for the static nobility of birth,8 a specific form in the impulse (often expressed in legislation and the practical policies of states)9 to consider the clergy in no way wholesome-made to other men but, on the contrary, as equal in the obligations of citizenship (if generally less competent in practical affairs), at least as alienable to sin, and in as desperate a need for salvation as other men, whom it was their obligation to serve rather than to command.This suggested at least that social order was unrelated to cosmic order, but it also raised the possibility tha t order per SE was of a kind quite different from what had been supposed. For the age of the Renaissance was by no meaner oblivious to the ? 230 ? need for order, which indeed historical disasters had converted into the most urgent of problems. But its very urgency intensified the necessity of regarding order as a practical rather than a metaphysical issue. Bitter experience seemed to demonstrate that order had to be brought down to earth, where it could be defined in limited and manageable ways.And, as the occasional intrusions of the clergy into politics appeared periodically to demonstrate, the attempt to apply ultimate principles to concrete problems was likely only to interfere with their practical solution. This was a central point not only for Machiavelli and his polities successors it also molded the numerous constitutional experiments of the Renaissance, with their repudiation of hierarchically defined lines of authority in favor of order through a balance of interests and their appealingness to contiguous local needs and the right of local self- determination.The best arrangements, in these terms, were not those that most accurately reflected some absolute pattern but those that best served the specific and limited human purposes for which they were instituted. But although a sense of the point of accumulation of the human intellect was basic to the thought of the Renaissance, this negation had a positive corollary in a new conception of the human personality which also seemed to correspond better to the experience supplied by a new social environment.Men whose lives consisted in the broad range of experiences, ontogenesis, and human relationships that characterized existence in the bustling and complicated modern world could no longer find plausible an repeal conception of man as a hierarchy of faculties properly subject to reason instead the personality presented itself as a complex and ambiguous unity in which the will, primarily responsive to the passions, occupied a position at the common snapping turtle.One result of this conception was to undermine the contemplative ideal if mans reason was weak but his will strong, he could only realize himself in this world through action, indeed he was meant for a life of action. Another was to reduce suspicion of the personify in the absence of the old psychological hierarchy, the body could no longer be held merely base and contemptible. Action infallible its use, and the new integrity of the personality reduced the possibility of attributing the human propensity to nuisance primarily to the physical or sensual aspect of mans nature.Human passions now also acquired a positive value, as the source of action. 10 This new anthropology, articulated by Patriarch, Salutation, and Villa, mandatory a reconsideration of the problem of immortality and led eventually to the ardent discussions of the soul in which Pompano figured. It also pointed to the political and historical concepti ons of Machiavelli and Caricaturing, who emphasized the primacy of will and passion, as hearty as to the psychological interests of a host of Renaissance writers. 11 ? 231 ? In addition man was defined as a social being if he lost one kind of participation in a larger reality, telephonely his abstract position as a member of the human species in the cosmic hierarchy of being, he, obtained another with, perhaps, more tangible satisfactions his membership as a concrete unmarried in the particular human community in which he lived, now an substantial rather than an accidental condition of is existence. Thus the values of human community now achieved full recognition.Human virtue was defined not as an abstraction but as a function of relationship with other men mans active nature was understood to achieve full expression only in a life of social responsibility, and indeed his happiness was seen as dependent on human community. Furthermore, since effective participation in society re quired some wealth, the conception struck another blow at medieval asceticism. On the other buy the farm the demands of life in society also stimulated a quite a little of human existence very different from that implicit in the contemplative ideal.For life in society was patently marked by a conflict of opposing interests that could rarely (if men were honest) be identified with absolute good or evil and to incessant struggle with other men was added, in social existence, the temptations that inevitably beset anyone who chooses to lock in with rather than to withdraw from the world. The life appropriate to men in this world was thus not loosening (however desperately one might long for it) 12 but a constant and virtuously ambiguous warfare, with the political relation issue ever in doubt. By the same token earthly life had also to be seen as dynamic, as subject to change in all its aspects.Human communities could be seen to rise, flourish, and decay and the philological inve stigations of Renaissance humanists supplemented familiar experience by disclosure the general outlines of ancient civilization and thus demonstrating how much had changed during the intervening centuries. 13 They also wrote histories that communicated not only this perspective on the past, with its implication that human culture is not an absolute but relative to its times, but in addition other aspects of the Renaissance vision of life the active and social nature of man, the values of community, the incapability of conflict and change.This vision found its fullest expression in the rhetorical culture of the Renaissance. Humanist oratory was based on the conception of man as a social being motivated by a will whose energies stemmed from the passions. This conception led in turn to a distinctive concern with communication as the essential bond of life in society, as well as to a new human ideal of the well-rounded, eloquent, and thus socially effective man of affairs.The purpose of communication, in this view, could not be the transmission of an absolute wisdom, which the human mind was incompetent to reach, but the attainment of concrete and practical ends. ? 232 ? Such communication had in a higher place all to be persuasive it had to affect the will by swaying the passions, rather than merely to convince the mind in short it needed to penetrate to the center of the personality in order to achieve results in visible acts. And the significance of the need for persuasion should also be remarked.It implied a life in society that could not be controlled by authority and coercion through a hierarchical chain of command but depended instead on the inward comply of individuals. It was therefore no accident that the rhetorical culture of Italian humanism achieved its fullest development in republics. In addition the needs of broad communication pointed eventually to the development and use of vernacular languages, a more important concern of Renaissance human ism than has sometimes been recognized. 14 II It should be immediately apparent that this set of attitudes imposed great strains on traditional Catholicism. 1 5 It undermined the effort to base earthly existence on abstract principles identified with betoken wisdom, and to relate the visible and changing world of ordinary experience to the invisible and invariant realm of the spirit. Both the comforts in this relationship and its implications for the guidance and intro of lower things by high were seriously threatened.From a Renaissance perspective the arguments by which it was supported seemed at best frivolous, at strike a specious rationalization of claims to power in this world on behalf of a group of men whose attention should be directed exclusively to the next. And behind such suspicions we may also discern the acquaintance of man as primarily a creature of will and passion. In this light intellectual claims were likely to be construed as masks for motives that could not bear inspection dogma itself might be no more than an instrument of tyranny.In addition, since a contemplative repose now seemed inappropriate to the actual nature of man, as well as a breach of responsibility for the welfare of others, the ideal form of the Christian life required redefinition. Finally, the problem of salvation was transformed. Alone in an ultimately unintelligible universe, and with the more fundamental conception of sin and the problems of its control opened up by the new anthropology, man could no longer count on the mediation either of reason or of other men in closer contact with the divine than himself.His salvation depended on an immediate and personal relation with God. Here it is necessary to pause for a more searching look at one of the key terms of our title Renaissance . The conceptions I have so far reviewed ? 233 ? have been based largely on developments in Italy, and this would suggest a vision of the Renaissance, or of Renaissance culture, as initi ally and perhaps primarily an Italian affair.But this audience is well aware that the tendencies I have described were also present in a variety of movements outside Italy, if in somewhat different forms. It is obvious, for example, that later medieval piety exhibited similar impulses ND that, in kindle of the hatred of humanists to scholastic speculation (though here we need to be more precise about what was actually under attack), the later schoolmate played a major if largely independent part in manner of speaking underlying assumptions to the wax and in attempting to accommodate theology to them. 16 Perhaps, therefore, the time has come to expand, as well as to make more specific, our conception of what was central to the age of the Renaissance, and also to abandon the traditional contrast between Italy and the North, which seems to me to eve been in some measure the result of a failure to get beneath surface differences.If I have concentrated on Italian thought in this sket ch, I have through so partly to bring out the fundamental unity of European spiritual development, partly because the affinities between Protestantism and later Scholasticism have been more regularly a concern of Reformation scholarship than the parallels with the Renaissance in Italy. What is nevertheless increasingly clear is that the process of redefining Christianity to bring it into correspondence with the new assumptions about man and the world as gradual, and that it was taking place simultaneously throughout Europe.Largely because of the recent profound book of Charles Trinkets, it is supernumerary to review in detail the process by which the pressures for religious change implicit in the assumptions of Renaissance culture operated among the humanists of Italy. They are already discernible in Patriarch, and they seem to have reached a climax in Lorenz Villa. In a general sense they may be attributed to the special loneliness and despair of men who could no longer regard rel igious truth as a body of knowledge of the name order as other knowledge that was communicable through similar kinds of intelligible discourse.Nor could the institutional fiddles encouraged by ecclesiastical authority as an alternative to rational theology provide a equal solution to the problem. Not only did the idea of implicit belief clash with the growing sense of individual spiritual dignity among pious laymen in addition, discredited by its impotence, its worldliness, the presumed irrelevance of its abstract theology, and a sacramental and disciplinary externalities increasingly inadequate to assuage the secularly intense guilt of the age, the church could no longer be regarded as a dependable guarantor of truth. ? 234 ? Thus, driven by a profound yearning for immediate contact with the eternal,17 the humanists of the early Italian Renaissance moved perceptibly toward a simple religion of adorn based on the Scriptures and apprehended by the individual through faith. Patriar ch typically began with insights into his own knowledgeable conflicts and the discovery that these could only be resolved by throwing himself on Gods mercy in a faith that was at once the highest form of knowledge and at the same time different n kind from all other knowledge confusion on this point seemed to him the most dangerous error.Salutation, concerned as a sterner moralist to protect human freedom and responsibility within a religion of grace, wrestled with the problem of predestination. And with Villa Justification by faith received an even fuller exploration, the role of priest and sacrament in the economy of salvation was correspondingly reduced, and that of Scripture, the Word whose authenticity could be established by philology and which verbalize directly to the individual, was enlarged. 18 Corresponding to the distinction between philosophy and faith was the demand or a distinct distinction between the church and the world the separation of realms in one area seeme d to lead of course to separation in others. In its demands for a spiritual church, the new historicism of the Renaissance collaborated with the insistence of the Italian states on freedom from clerical interference and with their grievances against Rome as a political force. 19 The study of the historical church revealed the spiritual costs of the confusion of realms. 20 At the very least, as men of the Renaissance with some political experience were in a position to know, the effective use of power in the world was always morally ambiguous21 and meanwhile the growing participation of popes and prelates in secular politics had been accompanied by an increasing neglect of the spiritual mission of the church. Thus, if reform required a return to the past, the reason was above all that the early church had been true to its spiritual characters. 22 Only a spiritual church, devoted to that which does not change, could stand above history and thus resist decay.Villas attack on the Donat ion of Constantine was not an insulate document23 it fleets a concern with the church, its earthly role and its spiritual mission, that runs through much of Renaissance historiography, from muskat at the beginning of the fourteenth century to Machiavelli, Caricaturing, and Far Paolo Carpi. 24 The rediscovery of grace was closely related to the new vision of man philosophy, as Patriarch recognized, was incapable of converting man at the crucial center of his being. It is one thing to know, he declared, another to love one thing to understand, another to will. What was required was a transformation not merely of the intellect but of the ? 235 ? hole personality, so that Christian conversion would find appropriate expression in a life of love and active responsibility for the welfare of others. And, as in the world, the essential meaner for such a transformation was not rational appeal to the intellect but rhetorical appeal to those deeper levels in man that alone could move the will . Thus Patriarch argued for the superiority over rational philosophers of moral teachers who could sow the love of virtue in the very hearts of men. 25 For Villa rhetoric was thus the only break of secular learning (except for philology) applicable to theology. 26 The implications of this position for the importance and character of preaching seem clear. A new conception of man was also reflected in a changed conception of God, in accordance, perhaps, not only with Renaissance emphasis on mans creation in Gods likeness and image but also with Callings recognition of the correlative relationship between mans understanding of himself and his knowledge of God. 27 Like man, God could no longer be perceive as a contemplative being, as Aristotle unmoved mover, operating in the universe not directly but through a research of intermediate powers. 28 Laymen active in the world required a God who was also active, who exercised a direct and vigilant control over all things, like that to whi ch they aspired for themselves.God too had therefore to be perceived as primarily will, intellectually beyond mans grasp yet revealing something of himself? all, at any rate, that man needed to know?in his actions, above all as record in Holy Scripture. And from Patriarchs sense of the free, mysterious, and incalculable nature of God,29 Salutation went on to defend the anthropomorphic representations f God in the Bible as a form of communication appropriate to mens capacities. 30 Villa was, as one might expect, even clearer that the God of philosophy could not be the God of faith. 31 In spite of all this, it is nevertheless undeniable that the culture of the Italian Renaissance did not culminate in Protestantism, although even on this point our old sense of the immunity of Italy to the impulses of the Reformation is no longer altogether tenable. 32 Yet it remains true that the religious thought of Renaissance Italy remained no more than an incoherent bundle of monumental insights, and it was unable to rid itself of fundamental contradictions again, however, the contrast with Northern Europe seems hardly absolute.Above all it failed to complete its credendum of mans intellectual limitations, which pushed him only part of the way into the realm of grace, with full conviction of his moral impotence. Even here its vision of man suggests a deepening in the understanding of sin and the human obstacles to salvation and there is abundant evidence of a pessimistic estimate of the human condition in Patriarch, Salutation, Pogo, Villa, and later, in a different form, in Machiavelli andCaricaturing. Yet Renaissance emphasis on the central importance of the will frequently served chiefly to nourish the moralist that so deeply permeated later medieval piety,33 contributing both to the notion of Christianity as the pursuit of moral perfection and of the church as essentially a system of government 34 Renaissance humanism remained, in Lathers sense, Appealing.The consequen ce was, however, that Renaissance culture in Italy, like Scholastic theology in the north, helped to intensify, from both directions at once, the unbearable tension between he moral obligations and the moral capacities of the Christian that could at last find relief only in either a repudiation of Renaissance attitudes or the theology of the Reformation. But it could not resolve the problem itself, and we must ask why this was so. section of the explanation is connected with the fact that some among the figures we have cited were lacking in theological interests, while the rest were amateurs whose major activity lay elsewhere.The result was an inability to develop the full implications of their assumptions, which was supplemented by prejudice against intellectual labor too closely resembling the Scholasticism they despised. In addition, closely attached to particular societies in which, traditionally, no distinction was made between Christianity and citizenship, they were unable to ach