Freedom. But the rebirth of classical studies was not
an end in itself for the humanists. Nor was its range
limited to the domain of language, of literature, of art,
and of history. Its main scope was that of returning
to man capacities, powers, and attitudes that medieval
culture had obscured or negated. The humanists were
aware that they were living in a world which was
rapidly changing and in which the medieval structures
(the Empire, the Church, feudalism) had lost their
validity. The Italian republics and signorial states were
headed by the new bourgeois class which, moreover,
was beginning to acquire political importance also in
the great monarchies of France, England, and Spain.
It was the era in which trade, voyages, and exchanges
of all sorts came to the forefront: the era which starts
with Columbus' undertaking the discovery of the new
world.
In these circumstances the humanists claim for man
a new position in the world. The old political
hierarchies, which held themselves to be repre-
sentatives and guardians of a cosmic order, ordained
and established directly by God, still made their force
felt; fires were still kindled for witches and heretics,
and life itself in the Italian cities was lacerated by
internecine quarrels. The Golden Age, the peaceful
and happy republic of which Plato had spoken, was
very remote from the reality in which the humanists
lived. But they held that man could and should work
to construct it.
This is the significance of the “discovery of man”
in which many historians have seen the principal ac-
complishment of humanism. The humanists had faith
in man's power to plan his life in the world, to com-
mand his destiny and direct it towards freedom, justice,
and peace. All Christian, patristic, and scholastic phi-
losophy had defended “free will,” and had made
countless attempts to reconcile it with divine provi-
dence and the immutable cosmic order in which it is
manifested. The humanists frequently took over these
attempts and repeated more or less the same solutions.
But what truly interested them was not free will as
an attribute inseparable from nature and the human
will, but what free will makes it possible for man to
be and to do, the capacity which it gives him of trans-
forming himself and his world. Giannozzo Manetti,
Pico della Mirandola, and Marsilio Ficino take their
cue from the old discussions of free will precisely in
order to show that capacity in mankind. Manetti
expressed the significance of human life with the for-
mula, Agere et intelligere, which he understood as
meaning “to know how and to be able to govern and
rule the world which was made for man.” In Pico's
oration, De dignitate hominis (1486), which has been
called the “Manifesto of the Italian Renaissance,” he
speaks of man as a being who, unlike all others, has
no fixed location nor aspect, nor determined form, nor
laws which determine his nature; but is one who can
choose for himself his location or nature, or whatever
form he wishes, and give his own laws to himself. Man
can, says Pico, either degenerate among inferior beings
or be regenerated among superior and divine beings.
All depends on his choice.
This confidence is shared by all the humanists and
not only the Italians. As has been said, it is only par-
tially an expression of the historical situation in which
humanism flourished, a situation in which, while new
forces were arising, the old forces of traditional institu-
tions and beliefs still fought vigorously and often had
the upper hand. It was rather a seed sown for the
future, a new plan of life for man and human society,
a new model of the relations that should be established
between man and the world of nature and of history.
It is an optimistic plan of which, now at a distance
of centuries, we can perceive the naïveté, because we
know that the real possibilities that are offered to man
are not infinite, but subject to restrictive conditions
of all kinds. In any event the humanists, making their
own the maxim Agere et intelligere, set as their first
aim a principle which we can hardly doubt today: the
limits of human planning are the same as the limits
of human knowledge.
