Renaissance humanism was a European intellectual movement beginning in Florence in the last decades of the 14th century during the Renaissance. The humanist movement developed from the rediscovery by European scholars of many Latin and Greek texts. Initially, a humanist was simply a teacher of Latin literature. By the mid-15th century humanism described a curriculum ? the studia humanitatis ? comprising grammar, rhetoric, moral philosophy, poetry and history as studied via classical authors. The early beliefs of humanism were that, although God created the universe, it was humans that developed and industrialized it.

Beauty, a popular topic, was held to represent a deep inner virtue and value, and an essential element in the path towards God.

The humanists were opposed to the philosophers of the day, the "schoolmen," or scholastics, of the Italian universities and later Oxford and Paris. The scholastics' methodology was derived from Thomas Aquinas, and this opposition revived a classical debate which referred back to Plato and the Platonic dialogues.

History

In the 1480s, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola wrote a preface to the nine hundred page thesis that he submitted for public debate entitled An Oration on the Dignity of Man. The debate never took place, but the work became a seminal text in the development of humanism. In it, he talked about how God created man and that man's greatness comes from God. He said that man was like a chameleon and could become whatever he wanted to be.

Humanists placed a heavy emphasis on the study of primary sources rather than the study of the interpretations of others. This is reflected in their motto of ad fontes, or "to the sources" which informed the search for texts in the monastery libraries of Europe. Humanist education, called the studia humanista or studia humanitatis (study of humanity), concentrated on the study of the liberal arts: Latin and Greek grammar, rhetoric, poetry, moral philosophy or ethics, and history.

Early 15th-century humanists were interested in classical Latin and not in medieval Latin, which was a different and more developed language with many neologisms. Petrarch, sometimes called the father of Renaissance humanism in Italy, called the Latin of the Middle Ages "barbarous;" when he collected his "Familiar Letters" his model was Cicero and his model for Latin was that used by Virgil, who was emerging from the persona as a magus that had accrued in the Middle Ages. This new interest in the classical literature led to the scouring of monastic libraries across Europe for lost texts. One such hunt by Poggio Bracciolini, who was credited with the discovery of the complete works of fifteen different authors, turned up Vitruvius' work on art and architecture, allowing for the completion of the Duomo of Florence by Filippo Brunelleschi.

Woodcut by Ambrosius Holbein for a 1518 edition of Thomas More's Utopia.

Humanism offered the necessary intellectual and philological tools for the first dispassionate analysis of texts. An early triumph of textual criticism by Lorenzo Valla revealed the Donation of Constantine to be an early medieval forgery produced in the Curia. This textual criticism began to create real political controversy when Erasmus began to apply it to biblical texts, in his Novum Instrumentum.

The crisis of Renaissance humanism came with the trial of Galileo which was centered on the choice between basing the authority of one's beliefs on one's observations, or upon religious teaching. The trial made the contradictions between humanism and traditional religion visibly apparent to all, and humanism was branded a "dangerous doctrine".

Social or civic humanism

Petrarch's Virgil (title page) (c. 1336)
Illuminated manuscript by Simone Martini, 29 x 20 cm Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan.

Beliefs

Renaissance humanists believed that the liberal arts (art, music, grammar, rhetoric, oratory, history, poetry, using classical texts, and the studies of all of the above) should be practiced by all levels of "richness". They also approved of self, human worth and individual dignity. They hold the belief that everything in life has a determinate nature, but man's privilege is to be able to choose his own nature. Pico della Mirandola wrote the following concerning the creation of the universe and man's place in it: Humanists believe that such possibilities lead to the diverse ways of human development. Value is given to this uniqueness and encourages individualism.

Relationship to Christianity

As Neo-Platonism replaced the Aristotelianism of Saint Thomas Aquinas, attempts were made to join the great works of Antiquity with Christian values in a syncretic Christian humanism, such as those by Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola. Ethics was taught independently of theology, and the authority of the Church was tacitly transferred to the reasoning logic of the educated individual. Thus humanists constantly skirted the dangers of being branded as heretics.

One example of such pagan philosophy and Christian doctrine melding is found in The Epicurean, by Erasmus, the "prince of humanists:"

If people who live agreeably are Epicureans, none are more truly Epicurean than the righteous and godly. And if it's names that bother us, no one better deserves the name of Epicurean than the revered founder and head of the Christian philosophy Christ, for in Greek epikouros means "helper." He alone, when the law of Nature was all but blotted out by sins, when the law of Moses incited to lists rather than cured them, when Satan ruled in the world unchallenged, brought timely aid to perishing humanity. Completely mistaken, therefore, are those who talk in their foolish fashion about Christ's having been sad and gloomy in character and calling upon us to follow a dismal mode of life. On the contrary, he alone shows the most enjoyable life of all and the one most full of true pleasure. (Erasmus 549)

This passage exemplifies the way in which the humanists saw pagan classical works such as the philosophy of Epicurus as being fundamentally in harmony with Christianity, rather than as a nemesis to be pitted against Christianity. Although Renaissance humanists were more accepting of pagan philosophy than their Scholastic contemporaries, they did not necessarily object to the idea that Christian understanding should be dominant over other modes of thought. Many humanists were churchmen, most notably Pope Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini Pius II.

Humanists

See also

• Renaissance
• Legal humanists
• Humanist Latin
• Humanism in Germany
• Scholasticism
• Humanism
• Greek scholars in the Renaissance

References

External links

• Erasmus, "The Epicurean," in Colloquies.
• Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man, in Cassirer, Kristeller, and Randall, Renaissance Philosophy of Man.
• ''Dictionary of the History of ideas'': "Renaissance Humanism"
• Catholic Encyclopedia article
• ''Dictionary of the History of ideas'': Renaissance Idea of the Dignity of Man"
• Kreis, Steven: "Renaissance Humanism
• Celenza, Christopher S. The Lost Italian Renaissance: Humanism, Historians, and Latin's Legacy. Johns Hopkins University Press. 2004 ISBN 978-0-8018-8384-2

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