UMANESIMO

HUMANISM. - It is impossible to understand the meaning of the word "humanism" unless it is historically circumscribed, that is, to the values it represented and expressed in the age to which it ultimately gave its name: the age of the Renaissance. However many other meanings it may have acquired, and sometimes in ways strangely distant from this original sense, are matters of everyday experience, and can be seen at once by consulting the essay by M. M. Rossi: *Note sulla modernità del Rinascimento* (in *Nuova r

iv. storica*, Jan

But from which year or century should this revival be dated? Still more: how long had classical studies been dead when this revival began? Among the representative episodes of how early, in the Christian world, the veneration of ancient poets and writers was quietly accommodated within piety—amid the incomprehension and surprise of the uninitiated—the most remote, or the most vivid, may be that of Julian the Apostate, who, failing to justify in Christians their love of the classics, believed himself justified in forbidding them on the basis of a dilemma that later became famous: if they tell falsehoods, you cannot read them because you would sin; if they tell the truth, you have no right to benefit from them (Rufinus of Aquileia, *Hist. Ecc.*, I, 32). That resistance of Christians was already misunderstood, just as Julian’s opposition was already anti-humanist, and it would have been a good prophet who, in his incomprehension of what was called paganism in the 4th century, had foreseen that of Luther in the face of what was called the paganism of the Church in the Renaissance. The fact is, in short, that despite apparent eclipses, this syncretism, as a genuinely orthodox state of mind, never ceased. It is well known: in the Iron Ages, the breviary ultimately counted for everything (when it counted at all), but then the decline of the classics depended not so much on aversion to reading them as on aversion to reading anything. Today, on this point, we have ideas different from and certainly better founded than those of the last century. One may or may not follow Gilson, the authentic master, when, by tempering to the point of nullifying certain traditional contrasts imagined between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, he sees in the implicit humanism of the former the precursor of everything, even the naturalistic vein, of the explicit humanism of the latter; but that Peter Damian himself and many others in his age, *ex cathedra*, were severe toward profane poetry, yet in other contexts did not hesitate to display their learning in it, is a fact now accepted by history. When we come to the 12th century, modern scholars (Bertin, Brezzi, Monteverdi) are unanimous in recognizing it as characterized by the renewed study of profane poets and moralists. This study, while indeed part of a more universal awakening of life, and fostered in the episcopal schools by the growing favor of the laity, still served as a component of theological doctrine, not as an antithesis; and from it there arose a state of mind that already contained, in embryo, that of the great Italian humanism.

Moreover, it is still commonly held that the chief hallmark of this humanism, from the 14th century onward, was the wandering of humanists through the damp corridors and under the dripping vaults of monastic libraries in search of Ciceros, Livys, and Virgils. But if the dripping vaults owe their romantic charm to the 19th century, which took its name from them, the miraculous discoveries of manuscripts were due above all to a misunderstanding; and in any case, they had already begun in the 12th century. The famous words of Petrarch—*has multorum me ingeniis per Italian excitatum et forsitan longius Italia* ("I have been roused by the talents of many throughout Italy and perhaps beyond")—have their precedent in those of Godfrey of Viterbo (1120–91): “Even if I lacked every other merit, this alone should suffice to win me fame: that I have brought the Muses, which for many centuries had lived hidden and dared not emerge from their closed retreats, back into the light; that I have restored to poetry its ancient splendor and stirred tardy poets to action.” In short, it was not a matter of discovery in the ordinary sense. In the monastic libraries, far from being abandoned and forgotten, these manuscripts were jealously guarded, and with a specific jealousy on the part of the growing lay culture, which then needed them and, to obtain permission to copy them, had to approach not the books themselves but, as Bacco says, their custodians or jailers, and ask for them in such a way as not to be refused. It is therefore natural that, in the Renaissance, and especially under the great humanist popes, the chief center of these transactions was the Roman Curia, that the most fortunate discoveries originated there, and that in the convent libraries it was advisable to arrive with good introductions or the charm of reputation and personality, as Petrarch himself did.

Yet how did it happen that this revival of classical culture, toward the end of the 12th century, came to such an abrupt halt? In the following century, of works in Latin refreshed only by the chlorophyll of literary sentiment, the trace of it almost disappears until Dante, the Paduan Cenacle, Petrarch’s precursors, and Petrarch himself. It is the long silence of Virgil, as Boccaccio explains. The *Elegia* of Henry of Settimello dates from 1192 or earlier, Peter of Eboli’s *Liber ad honorem Augusti* from 1195, the *De Balneis Puteolanis* from 1197; Godfrey of Viterbo died in 1191, Alexander Neckam, born in 1157, lived until 1211; but his *De Naturis Rerum* (which, moreover, already had so agnostic a flavor) with its naturalism, even if versified in 1212, was born in the 12th century. After that, silence. Why? And what is so exceptional and transfigured in this break of the 13th century, so that the classical revival of the 14th, however analogous to that of the 12th, can no longer be linked to it, and deserves the name of humanism chiefly for a new polemical ardor that characterizes it?

Old nineteenth-century scholars of the Middle Ages, tender toward an easy and comfortable continuity of the Latin tradition, ended up almost forgetting what a great event—cultural as well—was the arrival of the Arabs in the West in the thirteenth century. Today, however, the opposite excess is in vogue, and some do not hesitate to speak of the “Arab miracle”: a patent abuse of language, first of all because nothing in the event is miraculous, and then because, since the supreme merit of these Arabs did not lie in their originality but in that of the Greek culture they preserved and perpetuated, one ends up, time and again, invoking the usual “Greek miracle.” Yet implicit in this exaggeration is the great truth that at that moment in the thirteenth century (actually the second half of the twelfth), from that awakening of Greek cosmological sensibility worked by the Arabs, the so-called modern thought begins. The West, in possession of the entire Organon of Aristotle around 1150, of almost all the important works of Averroes by the mid-twelfth century, translator and interpreter of Greek medical treatises together with Jewish Arabists of the Schools of Montpellier and Salerno, precisely from a so-called awakening of scientific rationalism and its irreconcilability with the Latin tradition, moves to challenge the twelfth century, which instead depended entirely on this tradition, namely on the moralists of Rome. Of what overwhelming crisis, and all stirred by an irreligious shudder, this gave rise to from the very beginning in these studies, that is, in classical culture itself, the most characteristic witness is none other than John of Salisbury, with all his vast output and notably with his *Policraticus* and *Metalogicon*; he describes the nascent phenomenon as Petrarch will describe it in its full maturity, and for this reason, and for the limpid prose itself, he fully deserves the name of first humanist. The picture he paints of twelfth-century irreligiosity, despite its disconcerting realism, may perhaps err on the side of passion (the passion of the humanist) and be excessive. There is no doubt, however, that once armed with arguments drawn from the study of nature and become genuine naturalism, this Aristotelian rationalism turned against the great Platonic-Augustinian tradition with a kind of fury. It was then that between the two logics, one of Rhetoric and the other of Dialectic, according to Plato’s distinction, a misunderstanding began that the Renaissance echoes through the centuries. And just as Latin literature, with its poets and historians, its psychologists and its weak cosmological sentiment, depends entirely on the logic of Rhetoric, placing itself under the banner of the Socratic “Know thyself” and having as its object nothing but man in the perspectives of good and evil, so the logic of Dialectic, armed with Aristotelian physics, bundles together rhetoric, literature, Latin, Platonic idealism, and, impugning or devaluing them in the name of science, inaugurates with the motifs of the eternal Socratic drama the religious drama of the second millennium. For the rationalists of naturalism, John of Salisbury recounts, it was a matter of not allowing those “paracochi” (a parum curantes quid philosophia docet, quid appetendum fugiendumque denuntiet) with which the poets, historians, and Latin moralists were so well supplied, to put them off; hence the irreverent irony directed at these figures. And the poets and historians were considered unworthy; and if anyone dared to linger over their study, he was pointed at as a laggard Arcadian donkey, duller than lead or stone, and became the object of everyone’s scorn. Nor are these idle words. In this multiplying antithesis between the Greek world (science, pure logic, progress) and the Latin world (poetic fables, critical incapacity, static moralism), the first to suffer was the divine language of Rome; nor did it avail her that she had unified the world in the Word; there were those who thought to repudiate it and to lecture in the vernacular or in a barely Latinized vernacular (something not dared again after the humanist resurgence until the eighteenth century, and certainly not comparable to the exception of Galileo).

Senonché this rationalistic naturalism, emerging from the Arabist trend, was it truly so corrosive, so irreverent toward every tradition, and so pervasive as to literally contaminate even conventual life itself? One cannot deny that, given the mocking tone of their unbelief, these monks without u. would call to mind the Newtonian abbés of pre-Revolutionary France; and even if, in a certain Salisburyian manner of representing and vilifying them, the now discredited first u. were to exact its final vengeance, one fact remains beyond dispute: the upheaval wrought by their Aristotelianism in theology was, for the time being, terribly ambiguous, culminating in Averroist heresy. The collusion between rationalistic impiety and anti-humanistic impiety, which Salisbury describes as arising in the second half of the 12th century, is already the one Petrarch describes in *De sui ipsius*; nor can it be denied that the last layman in whom rationalism reconciled itself with u. was that very man who, in a sense, invented it—namely, Abelard. Afterward, the man of science raises his banner: neither rhetoric, nor poetry, nor Latin—*eloquentia* must not be studied; and, as he asserts, it has reached those who, though not blind, do not see, and those who, though not deaf, do not hear. The silence of Virgil begins. And where might this Aristotelian rationalism have ended in its slide toward impiety, had not St. Thomas come to reform it by making it his own—the only modernism ever to take root in the history of the Church, in the fine expression of Gilson? For, amid such adverse and shifting scientific circumstances, the reconciliation between critical reason and piety, as achieved by St. Thomas, retains an abiding intrinsic value. Yet the world was far from immediately grasping what Thomism represented. Time would have to pass before even the laity could easily distinguish this pious and authorized Aristotelianism from heretical Aristotelianism and its corollaries. Such was precisely the case with the humanists, who, in their aspiration to place Reason upon the throne of Wisdom as a religious value rather than a dissolving critical one, found their path opened by St. Thomas without recognizing II. Nor were they grateful. There were, of course, exceptions: but for a Bruni and a Pontano, who called themselves or were vaguely Thomist Aristotelians, the majority did not even suppose that a St. Thomas was needed to resolve the antithesis—Aristotelianism-science-impiety; Platonism-Wisdom-piety—nor could they bring themselves to love him, though they might distinguish him from the others. It is clear, then: this patristic piety of the humanists could hardly have been transplanted from the soil in which it was born and by which it was nourished—that is, from the reaction to 13th-century rationalism and its epigones; yet this does not make it any less sincere or subject to suspicion. Not for nothing did it become a passion, even a frenzy, when scholars began to guard their manuscripts like sacred relics, preachers to balance the elements of the two Bibles as if they were equivalent, and crowds rose to defend the supposed relics of Romans and Trojans as relics of saints. But where is the surer proof that u. could be anything but an aestheticizing and paganizing dilettantism of philologists—who create nothing, and least of all the most fruitful and glorious spiritual movement that Italy’s history recalls? If anything, the opposite is true: this revived love of the classics truly deserved the name of u. only when, united with religious sentiment through the medium of the visual arts—from palaces, churches, and the streets of Italy—it managed in some way to permeate even the consciousness of the people. Only thus, finally, even after Dante and Albertino Mussato had been recognized as peers of the humanists, and Dante, the unrelenting judge of his Averroist Guido, had drawn that enlightened distinction between St. Thomas and the other Aristotelian physicists and soothsayers which the humanists themselves failed to make, the age of the humanists must still be said to begin with Petrarch—not for his unadorned style or the manuscripts he uncovered, but perhaps while seated in his armchair—for the impetus he gave to the “priest” of Wisdom, collaborating with the priests of theology in the salvation of the world, in a mission of the learned that lasted nearly until Fichte’s reform. He had, to be sure, a precursor in Roger Bacon, who, however, by attaching science only to an initial illumination or prelevation, and by baptizing only the scientists as priests, had inverted Augustinianism. A genuine Augustinian, Petrarch turns not to democratic Greece—“which the world sets adrift at random”—but to the Platonic and Homeric Greece that Cicero, an unwitting herald of God, had begun to translate into his universal language, and which Roman poets, historians, and moralists had inherited in inspired fashion.

Yet the most suggestive difference between Bacon and Petrarch lies here: to Bacon’s precipitate crudeness in speaking of prelevation on the plane of science corresponds in Petrarch and his successors, on the plane of Wisdom, a profound sense of discretion, reserve, and mystery—capable of concealing even the hope of Cicero’s salvation, yet also of making Romanitas the sanctuary of the cardinal virtues and a Justice poised toward Charity. The artisans of this spiritual renewal stood before all—scholars, the unlearned, and the semi-learned of the visual arts—and the humanists sometimes took pride in this. It is no wonder, then, that, with their tendency to isolate themselves in a kind of caste consciousness evidenced by their correspondence—first Petrarch’s, last Erasmus’—they ended by presuming themselves necessary to the salvation of the world; and not without quarrels and rivalries with the priests of the Church, one of which degenerated into a dark, ill-defined, perhaps indefinable episode—MILETO (v.) and Platina against Paul II. What is more surprising is that this one-sided patristic stance blinded them to the fact that Thomist scholasticism, at least on one point, stands *toto caelo* apart from the Arabist variety—namely, on the question of Roman *pietas*; and that it was from no other source than Dante’s *De Regimine Principum* that Dante drew the great Augustinian motifs of the *Divine Comedy*. Here they are:

“For among all the kings and princes of the world, the Romans were the most solicitous of these things; God inspired in them good government, so that they worthily merited empire, as Augustine proves with various arguments (*De Civ. Dei*, Bk. V, ch. 15), which we may here reduce to three: ‘love of country, love of justice, and civic benevolence.’

‘Love of country is rooted in the soil of charity, which prefers common goods to one’s own, not one’s own to the common, as Augustine says in expounding the words of the Apostle of Charity’ (*ibid.*, Bk. III, ch. 4).

‘There is another reason why the Romans worthily acquired dominion, and it was their love of justice; thus they acquired sovereignty by a certain natural right from which every just dominion takes its beginning, as

the same Doctor» (ibid., ch. 5). Yet perhaps some lesser figures were exempt from the misunderstanding of such Thomistic Augustinianism: none of the greatest, neither Petrarch nor Erasmus; the fault lay partly in the superficial theological doctrine on one side, and on the other in literary ignorance; nor, in any case, does it fall to us to sit in judgment upon the long and sometimes abusive controversy between theologians and humanists, which was a leitmotif in Renaissance history. But even if, with regard to certain humanists, one were to accept the accusations of the friars—reciprocated in abundance by the famous Contra hypocritas—the humanist ideal of placing the shield of Wisdom in the service of Truth, rendering it impregnable forever and capable of unifying the world through the Word rather than through arms, remains the loftiest achievement of the Renaissance and stands great in the spiritual history of Italy and the world. Nor should one seek to diminish it by saying that, after all, these scholars repeated the parody of the Phaedo: “We recover a truth that is already ours,” and spoke Platonically of learning as a process of recalling things already possessed by men; yet in fact their authors were loved precisely because they had been rediscovered and rethought by them and subjected to the scrutiny of their subjectivity. Such a limitation is either true and valid for all men of every time and place—inasmuch as the assertion of one’s own personality and moral independence is in every individual and in every act the very presupposition of life—or it is less applicable to no other event than to Humanism. That reaction against a stable wisdom was one with the reaction against the thirteenth-century rationalist criticism, and it found expression in many forms, but most clearly, one might say most tangibly, in the idea that its instrument too must be stable and unique: Latin.

When, therefore, Humanism is centered upon the fact of the relative but surprising revival of dead Latin over the already victorious and triumphant vernaculars, it is not reduced to a secondary episode; rather, its ideal core is revealed. The humanists might oscillate between a near-mystical identification of the Logos with its verbal instrument (as in the case of the supremely unscrupulous Valla) and a cautious distinction between them (as in the case of Erasmus); yet for all of them the unity of the one was a corollary of the unity of the other, and none are exceptions—not even those few who, as if in an act of charity, sometimes offered the treasures of wisdom to the unlearned at the table of the vernacular. It is for this reason that even after demonstrating how weak the foundation may be for the distinction between a first and a second period of Humanism—inasmuch as Erasmus at its close still moved within the ideal orbit of its initiator Petrarch, and even after recognizing that in the thirteenth century the cosmological Greece had given thought an impulse to which the Platonic Greece discovered in the fifteenth added little—there remains a point of legitimacy in the idea cherished by Foscolo: that true Humanism must be dated from the exodus of the Greeks to the Councils of Constance and Basel and from the fall of Constantinople, from the arrival of Chrysoloras in Florence in 1397. Only then did it seem that the immense dream might be realized for which, in a rash impulse, Petrarch and Boccaccio had stooped to decipher Homer under the guidance of some Levantine: to place beside the one Sacred Bible a single profane Bible from which wisdom might radiate its almost salvific power through the universality of Latin.

What spread through the West with the disciples of Chrysoloras (first among them Bruni) was a veritable fever: translation. And with what fruit? Little indeed. Too readily accepted, the Platonic presupposition of a wisdom to be recovered could also encourage laziness and haste. Without troubling to revise the text, without true stylistic research, without the support of some academic aestheticism, many scholars—sometimes only because they knew Greek—translated “by the job,” only to bristle with indignation if called not learned men but grammarians. This profane Bible, then, did not succeed because it was chimerical. Yet despite those even today who, at the call of crude nineteenth-century distortions, see in them nothing but cynicism and mercenariness, the truth is quite otherwise: the most active character of the culture of which they were a symbol was that mystical enthusiasm by which the most pious Nicholas V could repeat that translating a work from Greek was like freeing a soul from Purgatory, and spirits as diverse as the meticulous Ermolao Barbaro, all pure philology, and Lorenzo Valla, all ideological controversy, could agree in admitting almost without criticism (or beyond criticism) that, once rescued from the barbarism of Arabizing vulgarizations into Ciceronian clarity, Aristotelian thought would be found in a state of near proximity to Christian thought; and rulers, inspired by scholars, could exchange as “weapons of peace” codices of ancient sages. Confirmation of this is found even in the two great exceptions, Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola, who from this philology sought to rise to a supreme challenge to impious Peripateticism in a new Platonic theology, and thereby incurred both the condemnation of the Church and that of the supreme pontiff of Humanism, Erasmus of Rotterdam.

Yet whatever developments followed from their Platonism, their first move was a humanist translation confined to Plato, the Platonists, and the Neoplatonists; and it was also their last, for nothing else remained of them in their wandering and generic disciples save a great desire to read, however they could. The Gorgias, and a juxtaposition of it with the Imitation of Christ. A juxtaposition that the Church did not condemn at all and, within certain limits, even encouraged, as seen in the work of Perugino in the Stanza del Cambio and Raphael in the Stanza della Segnatura. It was left to the followers of Peripateticism to attack and ridicule it, with the old arguments of Julian the Apostate, with a barely concealed aversion to the very Latin tongue, and with evident sympathy for the Arabist tradition: a Marzio da Narni, a Pomponazzi. Moreover, as long as the impulse of this culture endured in the world—that is, until Romantic Jansenism—no one thought to brand as pagans some of the most Christian men of our Renaissance; no one cited as an example of diabolical pagan obduracy of heart the most pious Sannazaro, who, to be buried in the bosom of Mary, had a church dedicated to her built and placed his tomb within it, yet on that tomb, in an allegory echoing that of the Divine Comedy, allowed no Christian symbols to be inscribed, only those of Wisdom (Minerva and Apollo). Almost the same thing had been done by Pontano in his little church.

The other face of this philological Humanism was, in short, a veritable mysticism. It is often said that, in their vanity as priests of the spirit, these humanists estranged themselves from their country and family in a kind of mannered supranationalism. This is much exaggerated: it would suffice to cite the exception of Pontano and his lofty protest: “What is greatest and most beautiful among men is the administration of the republic.” And what of Coluccio Salutati? And Antonio Loschi? It is not true that in defending with their pens the chancelleries—one of the Florentine Republic, the other of the Visconti—they acted only out of personal interests. Yet it remains true that intrinsic to their ideology was an aspiration toward supranationality. This could not be abandoned without abandoning Humanism itself; and Torquato Tasso showed himself outside it when, in his *Minturno*, he did not praise but deplored this estrangement from life on the part of the old humanists to Giacomo Ruscelli: “If I am not mistaken, the cause has been a weakness of intellect, by which they were unable to manage both public and private affairs together.”

Returning then to the beginning, humanism as the opposition between what is within us and what is outside us, between the study of man and the study of nature, as the emancipation of ethical values from critical rationalism, is a Socratic state of mind that can resurface at any moment in generations and individuals. But its heroic moment, its supreme synthesis with Christianity, was the Italian Renaissance; and from then on it remains in the classical tradition as a formidable legacy. The Reformation rejects all of this humanistic synthesis: Latin, which had been its emblem, becomes a luxury and a pastime for readers; the sacred Bible and the profane Bible become vernacular almost simultaneously. England, more on guard against the excesses of individualism, seeks a middle way between Catholicism and Lutheranism; but even there humanism fails to survive; the Moros, the Fishers, the Poles close the ranks of Catholic humanists and give voice to the reason for their dissent. And these can be summarized as follows: “You have gradually ended up placing the Sacred Bible on the same level as the profane one, without specifying however on what foundation. And the dilemma remains open. Either these scholars reached such heights because inspired by God, and then you must place them alongside the prophets and the Apostles; or they reached them by their own virtue, and then you cannot prevent the conclusion that the discovery of the eternal Logos is sufficient for the heart of man and Grace is superfluous.” One cannot deny that there is a kernel of truth in these words, nor that they strangely resemble those with which Julian the Apostate began his battle against humanism.

For the pedagogy of humanism and the Renaissance: V. PEDAGOGIA, storia della.