Two Interpretations. Renaissance humanism is the
name for an intellectual movement that developed in
Italy from the middle of the fourteenth century to the
end of the fifteenth, and which had as its aim a new
evaluation of man, of his place in nature and in history,
and of the disciplines which concern him. The first
characteristic feature of this movement is that it origi-
nated and was carried on not by professional philoso-
phers but by men of letters, historians, moralists, and
statesmen, in dispute with the philosophers of the time,
to whom they opposed the aurea sapientia (“golden
wisdom”) of the philosophers and writers of the classi-
cal period. The philosophers of that time who were
teaching in the Italian universities, or in those of Paris
or Oxford, were to all intents and purposes Ockhamists,
followers of the logica moderna, that is of nominalistic
or terministic logic. Very often they used this logic in
treating physical and mathematical questions and es-
pecially in the solution of the difficulties inherent in
the concept of infinite quantity; that is, of a quantity
which can be made greater or smaller than any given
quantity. The De sensu composito et diviso (“Of
Compounded and Divided Meaning”) of Heytesbury
(fl. 1340) and above all the Liber calculationum (“Book
of Calculation”) of Swineshead (fl. 1340) (also called
Suseth or Suiseth) found in the Italian schools of the
second half of the fourteenth century numerous
imitators and followers, and there was a proliferation
of Sophismata, Insolubilia, and Obligationes which
claimed to solve innumerable paradoxes; from the more
ancient ones, characteristic of the Megarian-Stoic
School (like that of the liar), to the later ones connected
with the augmentation or diminution ad infinitum of
size, intensity, motion, velocity, weight, etc.
When between 1351 and 1353 Petrarch collected
his Familiares (“Familiar Letters”), he placed among
the first some letters which contained a stringent criti-
cism of this type of philosophy. It seemed to Petrarch
to be a dialectic in the worst sense of the word; that
is, not a genuine logic, but a sophistic artifice aimed
at routing the adversary without respect for truth. The
questions treated by this dialectic appeared futile and
idle to Petrarch, unworthy of the attention of men
preoccupied with attaining true wisdom. True wisdom
concerns mankind and his deeds, the conduct of private
life and the governance of the state, the enjoyment
of beauty and the contemplation of truth. These have
always been the ends which the classical philosophers
pursued. Modern philosophers disregard these ends and
mistakenly take dialectic, which is a simple means of
inquiry, for an end in itself. But if it is useful for
training youth in discussion, it becomes a futile and
ridiculous game in the hands of mature men who ought
to confront the real problems of life.
This polemical position was renewed by all the
Italian humanists between the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries.
Coluccio Salutati, who for thirty years was chancel-
lor of the Signoria of Florence, Leonardo Bruni, and
Lorenzo Valla to name only the major figures, took
over as their task Petrarch's condemnation, and insisted
on the necessity of a man's education being based on
the disciplines which are closely connected with the
nature and conduct of man, such as poetry, eloquence,
history, philosophy, ethics, politics, and economics; on
those disciplines, in short, which already in Cicero's
time, Aulus Gellius (Noctes Atticae, XIII, 17) had
maintained constituted the true paideia and humanitas,
that is, the education of man as man, insofar as he is
distinguished from all the other animals.
This debate between humanists and Scholastics
might at first sight seem like a debate between the “two
cultures,” that is, between a culture of a scientific
tendency and one of a rhetorical or literary tendency.
In fact, that is how it has been interpreted by some
who have seen in humanism an “essentially medieval
and essentially Christian” phenomenon; hence the
continuation and elaboration of a doctrine that had
already been prevalent (Bush, p. 30).
From this point of view humanism has no specific
character. Already in the thirteenth century there had
been a rebirth of classical culture and especially of the
theological conceptions of Plato and Aristotle, to which
Saint Thomas had given a new form. Werner Jaeger
in particular insisted on this point in an essay
Humanism and Theology (Milwaukee, 1943), which has
thrown light upon the close connection between
classical theology and the concept of paideia, that is,
humanistic education. A corollary of this interpretation
is that far from aiding in the birth of modern science
—which coincided with the work of Leonardo and
Galileo—humanism really constituted a retarding
influence; that it is thus a “counter-Renaissance,”
actually a counter-humanism, according to Hiram
Haydn (
The Counter-Renaissance, 1950); and that the
antecedents of science should be sought (as Duhem had
already done) in the development of medieval Aris-
totelianism. Even the latter had been retarded, and not
promoted, by Renaissance humanism (M. C. Clagett,
1959; John H. Randall, Jr., 1961).
This interpretation, however, is opposed not only
to the explicit assertions of the humanists, who believed
they were living in a new epoch, but also to the other
interpretation which takes literally the assertions of the
humanists seeking to justify its validity by showing that
if humanistic culture has from many points of view
the same content as medieval culture, it has a different
form which shows a new spirit, that is, a new attitude
towards the world. This thesis has been sustained in
classic works (Burckhardt, Dilthey, Voigt, Cassirer), and
has been taken up with renewed vigor and greater
balance by competent scholars, both Italian and non-
Italian. In its more aware and modern form this inter-
pretation does not take literally all the these of the
humanists. It does not deny the historical continuity
between medieval and humanistic culture which are
both fed from the same sources, those of classical
antiquity. It does not deny the permanence in
humanism of the theological presuppositions that
classical antiquity and medieval philosophy had made
their own. It does not agree with those humanists when
they pretend that the whole medieval period was an
epoch of barbarism, and that man's every effort must
be directed towards emerging from this state of
barbarism, and entering into the promised land of truth
and freedom. At the same time they retain the idea
that humanism constituted a force of radical innovation
and that it alone had laid the foundations of what today
we call “the modern world.”
