Humanism

HUMANISM. - It is not possible to reach an understanding about the meaning of the word humanism unless one circumscribes it historically, that is, to the values that it represented and expressed in the age to which it ended up giving its name: the age of the Renaissance. In how many other meanings, and sometimes strangely remote from this one, it may still be valid is a matter of everyone's daily experience, and at the moment it can be seen summarized in the essay by M. M. Rossi: Note sulla modernità del Rinascimento (in Nuova riv. storica, Jan.-Aug. 1950). These amplifications, deformations, mythicizations have nothing surprising about them: they are analogous to those that occur in the words historicism, Epicureanism, Pyrrhonism, and also Cartesianism, Encyclopedism, criticism, as soon as they cease to be referred to a specific and well-circumscribed ideological fact. In the specific case of humanism, the historical and also ideological core is represented by the revival of classical studies and by their radiation into the culture and thought of the nascent modern world.

Yet from what year or century must 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 cult of the ancient poets and writers became tacitly allied with pietas, amid the incomprehension and surprise of the profane, the most remote, or the most vivid, may be that of Julian the Apostate who, failing to justify in Christians the love of the classics, believed himself entitled to forbid it to them on the basis of a dilemma that later became famous: if they tell falsehoods you cannot read them because you would be committing sin; if they tell the truth you have no right to profit from them (Rufinus of Aquileia, Hist. Eccl., I, 32). That resistance of the Christians was already misunderstood humanism, just as that opposition of Julian was already anti-humanism, and he would have been a good prophet who, in Julian's incomprehension before the so-called paganism of the 4th century, had foreseen that of Luther before the so-called paganism of the Church of the Renaissance. The fact is, in short, that, despite apparent eclipses, this syncretism, as a genuinely orthodox state of mind, never ceased again. It is well known: in the iron centuries what ended up counting (when it counted) was only the breviary; but then the decadence of the classics depended not so much on aversion to reading them as on aversion to reading. Today, on this point, ideas have changed from those of the last century and are certainly better founded. One may or may not follow Gilson, an authentic master, all the way when, tempering to the point of annulling certain traditional contrasts imagined between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, he sees in the implicit humanism of the former everything, including the naturalistic vein, of the explicit humanism of the latter prefigured in advance; but that Pier Damiani himself and however many others in his age were most severe, ex cathedra, toward profane poetry, in other settings were not ashamed to show themselves learned in it, is a fact established in history. When one then arrives at the 12th century, modern scholars (Bertin, Brezzi, Monteverdi) are agreed in recognizing it as characterized by the reawakened study of the profane poets and moralists. This study indeed inscribes itself within a more universal reawakening of life, is increased, in the episcopal schools, by the growing favor of the lay world, but always as a coefficient of theological doctrine, not as an antithesis; and from it flourishes a state of mind that already contains more than in germ that of the great Italian humanism. There is more. Even today there passes as the chief hallmark of this, from the 14th century onward, a wandering of the humanists through the moldering cloisters and under the drippings of monastic libraries in search of Ciceros, Livys, Virgils; but if the drippings come from the romantic ardor by which history was characterized in the century that takes its name from it, the nineteenth, the miraculous discoveries of codices come first of all from a misunderstanding and, in any case, had already begun in the 12th century. The famous words of Petrarch « haec nostra studia multi neglecta saecula, multorum me ingeniis per Italiam excitasse et forsitan longius Italia » (Sen., XVIII, 2), have their precedent in those of Godfrey of Viterbo (1120-91): « When every other merit were lacking to me, this alone ought to suffice to reconcile me to fame: to have divulged the Muses who for many centuries had lived hidden and did not dare to come forth from their closed inner chambers; to have restored to songs their ancient splendor and spurred on the late poets ». In short, it was not really a matter of discovering: it was a matter of discovering in a quite particular sense. In the monastic libraries, far from being abandoned and forgotten, these codices were guarded even too well and with a specific jealousy on the part of the growing lay culture, which then had need of them and, in order to reach them, or at least obtain permission to copy them, had to discover not them but, « per mediatores », as Bacon says, who their holders or jailers were, and how they might be requested without being answered no. It is natural therefore that, in the Renaissance, and especially with the great humanist popes, the major center of this information should be the Roman Curia, that the most fortunate discoverers should set out from there, and that, in the conventual libraries, it should be advisable to arrive with good letters of recommendation or with the charm of fame and of one's person, in precisely the manner of Petrarch.

And yet how did it happen that this reawakening of classical culture toward the end of the 12th century came to a halt almost at a stroke? In the following century, of Latin works barely refreshed by the chlorophyll of literary sentiment, almost no trace survives until Dante, the Paduan Cenacle, the precursors of Petrarch, Petrarch himself. It is the long silence of Virgil, as Boccaccio explains. The Elegia of Henry of Settimello goes back to 1192 or earlier, the Liber ad honorem Augusti of Peter of Eboli to 1195, the De Balneis Puteolani to 1197; Godfrey of Viterbo dies in 1191, Alexander Neckam, born in 1157, reaches as far as 1211; but his De Naturis Rerum (moreover of an already so thirteenth-century taste with its dry naturalism), even if poured into verse in 1212, comes into the world in the 12th century. After that, silence. How so? And what is there so exceptional and transfiguring in this rupture of the 13th century, that the classical revival of the 14th, however full of analogies with that of the 12th, can no longer reconnect with it, and merits the name of humanism above all for a new polemical ardor that characterizes it?

The old nineteenth-century scholars of the Middle Ages, fond of an axiomatic and comfortable continuity of the Latin tradition, ended up almost forgetting what a great event, cultural as well, the arrival of the Arabs in the West had been in the 13th century. Precisely at the very end of that century, today the opposite excess is favored, and there are those who do not hesitate to speak of an "Arab miracle": with evident abuse of the word, first of all because there is nothing miraculous in the fact, and then because, since the supreme merit of these Arabs consists not in their originality but in that of the Greek culture preserved and perpetuated by them, turn it as you will, one always ends up dragging in the usual "Greek miracle." There is implicit in this exaggeration, however, the great truth that at that moment of the 13th century (in reality of the second half of the 12th), from that reawakening of Greek cosmological sensibility, the work of the Arabs, so-called modern thought takes its start. The West, in possession of the whole Organon of Aristotle around 1150, of almost all the important works of Averroes around the middle of the 1200s, translator and interpreter of the Greek treatises on medicine together with the Jewish Arabists of the School of Montpellier and Salerno, precisely from such a reawakening of scientific rationalism and from its irreconcilability with the Latin tradition, moves to challenge the humanism of the 12th century, which instead depended entirely on that tradition, that is, on the moralists of Rome. Of what overwhelming crisis, and one entirely driven by an irreligious thrill, followed from the very first moment for these studies, that is, for classical culture itself, the most characteristic witness, with all his vast work and especially with the Policraticus and the Metalogicon, remains always John of Salisbury, who describes the nascent fact as Petrarch would describe it in its full development, and for this reason, and for the very limpidity of his prose, deserves without question the name of first humanist. The picture he draws of thirteenth-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 a true and proper naturalism, this Aristotelian rationalism aimed against the great Platonic-Augustinian tradition with a kind of fury. It was then that between the two logics, the one of Rhetoric, the other of Dialectic, according to Plato's distinction, there began a misunderstanding with which the Renaissance resounds through the centuries.
And just as Latin literature, with its poets and its historians, with its psychologists and with the weakness of its cosmological feeling, depends entirely on the logic of Rhetoric, places itself under the banner of the Socratic Know thyself and has as its object nothing but man in the perspectives of good and evil, so the logic of Dialectic, armed with Aristotelian physics, throws everything into one bundle—rhetoric, literature, Latin, Platonic idealism—and, attacking them or devaluing them in the name of science, initiates with the motifs of the eternal Socratic drama the religious drama of the second millennium. For the rationalists of naturalism—Salisbury recounts—the point was not to let themselves be fitted by Ethics with those "paracchi" (= parum curantes quid philosophia doceat, quid appetendum fugiendumque denuntiet) with which they find the poets, historians, and Latin moralists so well provided; whence, toward these, an irreverent irony. "Poets and historians were considered unworthy; and if anyone dared to linger in the study of them, he was pointed at and, as more tardy than an Arcadian donkey, more obtuse than lead or stones, became an object of mockery to all."
And these are not 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 for it was the divine language of Rome; nor did it avail it further to have unified the world in the Word; there were immediately those who thought of repudiating it and of lecturing in the vernacular or in a barely Latinized vernacular (a thing no longer dared afterward, after the humanistic counterattack, until the 18th century, and certainly not comparable to the exception of Galileo).

Yet was this naturalistic rationalism, sprung from the Arabist gust, truly so corrosive, so irreverent toward every pious tradition, and so spreading that even conventual life itself remained literally contaminated by it? One cannot deny that, by the mocking tone of their unbelief, these monks without humanism would suggest the Newtonian abbots of the eve of the French Revolution; and even granting that, in a certain Salisburian way of representing them and debasing them, the now enfeebled early humanism took its extreme revenge, one fact remains undisputed: the upheaval wrought by their Aristotelianism in theology was for the time being terribly ambiguous, and culminated in the Averroist heresy. The collusion between rationalistic impiety and anti-humanistic impiety that Salisbury describes as nascent in the second half of the 12th century is already the one that Petrarch would describe in the De sui ipsius; nor can one deny that the last layman in whom rationalism was reconciled with humanism was that first one who in a certain sense invented it, namely Abelard. Afterward, the man of science raises his banner: neither rhetoric, nor poetry, nor Latin: "eloquentiae negat esse studendum; ipsamque, sicut visum non caeco, auditum non surdo, asserit pervenisse ei, qui mutus non est." The silence of Virgil begins. And where would this Aristotelian rationalism have arrived in its slipping toward impiety, if, to reform it by making it his own, St. Thomas had not come, with the only modernism that ever managed to gain a foothold in the history of the Church, according to Gilson's fine expression? For, even amid so many and so adverse transformations of scientific circumstances, the reconciliation between critical reason and pietas, as it was accomplished in St. Thomas, still preserves an immanent value of its own. Nevertheless the world was far from immediately realizing what Thomism represented. More time had yet to pass before even to the profane this pious and authorized Aristotelianism would present itself as easily distinguishable from heretical Aristotelianism and its corollaries. This was precisely the case of the humanists, who, in their aspiration to place Reason on the throne of Wisdom as a religious value, not as a dissolving critical value, had the road opened by St. Thomas, and did not notice it, and were not grateful to him. There were naturally exceptions: but for a Bruni and a Pontano, who called themselves or believed themselves Aristotelians and vaguely Thomists, the majority did not even suppose that to reform the antithesis "Aristotle-science-impiety"; "Plato-Wisdom-pietas," a St. Thomas should suffice; they could arrive at distinguishing him from the others, not at loving him. It is clear, then: this patristic pietas of the humanists could ill be transplanted from the terrain in which it was born and by which it was fertilized, that is, by the reaction to thirteenth-century rationalism and its epigones; but it is not for this reason any less genuine or open to suspicion. Not for nothing did it become a passion and even a passionate excess and even fanaticism, when scholars set about guarding their codices as if they were sacred, and preachers dispensed the elements of the two Bibles as though they were equivalent to one another, and crowds rose up to defend the supposed relics of the Romans and Trojans as relics of saints; but where is there surer proof that humanism could be everything except an aestheticizing and paganizing dilettantism of philologists? With that nothing is created, and least of all would there have been created the spiritual movement richest in consequences and most glorious that the history of Italy remembers. The contrary, if anything, is true: that revived love of the classics truly deserved the name of humanism only when, joined to religious feeling through the merit of the figurative arts, from the palaces, from the churches, through the streets of Italy, it succeeded in permeating in some way even the conscience of the people. Only for this reason, in the end, even after Dante and Albertino Mussato had already been recognized as on a par with humanism, and after there had been recognized in Dante, the inexorable judge of his Averroist Guido, that enlightened discrimination of St. Thomas from the other Aristotelian physicists and soothsayers which was later lacking in the humanists, nevertheless the age of the latter must always be made to begin with Petrarch; and not because of his style without cursus or because of the codices discovered, perhaps, in an armchair; but because of the impetus he gave to the "priest" of Wisdom, a collaborator with the priests of theology in the salvation of the world, in a mission of the learned man that lasted almost until the reform of Fichte. He had certainly had a precursor in Roger Bacon, who, however, by linking only science to an initial illumination or pre-revelation, by baptizing only scientists as its priests, had made of Augustinianism a reversal. A genuine Augustinian, Petrarch appeals not to the democratic Greece "which the world places at random," but to the Platonic and Homeric Greece which Cicero, unconscious herald of God, had begun to transfer into his own and universal language and which the poets, historians, and moralists of Rome had inherited in spirit. Another, however, is the more suggestive difference between Bacon and Petrarch: to the precipitous coarseness with which the former speaks of pre-revelation, on the plane of Science, there corresponds in the latter and in his successors, on the plane of Wisdom, a great sense of discretion, of reserve, of mystery, capable of passing over in silence the hope for the salvation of Cicero, but also of making of Romanity the sanctuary of the cardinal virtues and of a Justice wholly poised toward Charity. Artificers of this spiritual renewal in the eyes of all — of the learned, of the unlearned, and of the half-learned of the figurative arts — the humanists sometimes took pride in this. There is no cause for surprise, therefore, if, with the tendency to isolate themselves in a certain caste consciousness of which their letter collections are testimony, first that of Petrarch, last that of Erasmus, they ended by presuming themselves necessary to the salvation of the world; and not without squabbles and rivalries with the priests of the Church; one of which degenerated into a dark episode, ill-defined and perhaps indefinable, the famous conspiracy of Pomponio Leto (v.) and of Platina against Paul II.

It may surprise us instead that this patristic one-sidedness also veiled from them the fact that the scholasticism of St. Thomas at least on one point stands toto caelo apart from that of the Arabists, on the point of Roman pietas, and that it was from no other source than the De Regimine Principum that Dante had drawn the great Augustinian motifs of the Divine Comedy. Here they are: "Because among all the Kings and Princes of the world the Romans were the most solicitous of the said things, God inspired them with good government, so that they deservedly merited the empire, as Augustine proves with various reasons (De Civ. Dei, l. V, ch. 15) which, narrowing them down, we can here reduce to three: "the love of the Fatherland, the love of Justice, civil benevolence." "The love of the fatherland is founded on the root of charity, which places common things before one's own and not one's own before common things, as Augustine says in expounding the words of the Apostle of Charity" (l. III, ch. 4). "There is another reason for which the Romans deservedly acquired dominion, and it was the love of justice; whence they acquired the principate by a certain right of nature from which every just dominion has its beginning, as writes the same Doctor" (ibid., chap. 3). And yet of the misunderstanding of such an Augustinian character of humanism Thomas was perhaps free, as were some minor figures: of the greatest, none, not Petrarch, not Erasmus; the fault also lying in too superficial a theological doctrine on the one hand, and in literary ignorance on the other; nor is it for us in any case to sit as arbiters in the long and at times abusive diatribe between theologians and humanists, a leit-motif in the history of the Renaissance. But even if, with regard to certain humanists, one wished to accept the accusations of the fraticelli, repaid in turn ad abundantiam by the famous Contra hypocritos, the humanistic ideal of being able to hand over to Truth the shield of Wisdom and render it impregnable forever and capable of unifying the world through the Word rather than through arms, remains the highest fact of the Renaissance and remains great in the spiritual history of Italy and of the world. Nor should one seek to belittle it by saying that, in the end, these scholars were indeed repeating the words of the Phaedo: "We recover a truth that is already ours," and spoke in Platonic fashion of learning as a re-ascent to things already possessed by men; but in fact their authors they loved insofar as they were rediscovered and rethought by them and brought back to the test by their own subjectivity. Such a limitation is either true and valid for men of every time and place, insofar as the awareness of one's own personality and moral independence is in every individual and in every act the very precondition of living; or it is applicable to no fact less than to humanism. That reaction against a stable wisdom was one and the same with the reaction against thirteenth-century rationalist criticism, and it expressed itself 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 on the fact of the relative but astonishing revenge of dead Latin over the already victorious and triumphant vernaculars, one does not reduce it to a secondary episode; one discovers it rather in its ideal core. The humanists could oscillate between an almost mystical adequation of the Logos and its verbal instrument (this is the case of the very unprejudiced Valla) and a prudent distinction between them (this is the case of Erasmus); for all of them, however, the unity of the one was a corollary of the unity of the other; nor do those few make an exception who sometimes, as in a work of charity, offered the treasures of wisdom to the unlearned at the vernacular table. And it is for this reason that even after having demonstrated how weak a foundation the distinction between a first and a second period of humanism may have, since Erasmus in the epilogue always moves within the ideal orbit of the initiator Petrarch, even after recognizing that in the thirteenth century cosmological Greece had given thought an impulse to which the Platonic Greece, discovered in the fifteenth century, adds little; there retains a point of legitimacy the idea cherished by Foscolo that true humanism should be dated from the exodus of the Greeks for the Councils of Constance and Basel and for the fall of Constantinople, from the arrival of Chrysoloras in Florence in 1397. Only then, in fact, did that immense dream seem close to becoming reality, the dream for which, in a willful impulse, a Petrarch and a Boccaccio had adapted themselves to spell out Homer in the school of some Levantine: to constitute alongside the one Sacred Bible a single profane Bible from which wisdom would release its almost salvific force through the universality of Latin. What spread to the West with the disciples of Chrysoloras (first among them Bruni) was a veritable fever: to translate. And with what fruit? Very little. Too comfortably accepted, the Platonic presupposition of a wisdom to be recovered could also favor laziness and haste. Without giving much thought to revising the text, without a true stylistic search, without the support of some indefinable academic aestheticism, not a few scholars, sometimes such only by their knowledge of Greek, translated "by the piece," only to resent with intemperance if they were called not wise men but grammarians. This profane Bible, in short, did not succeed because it was chimerical. But, in spite of all those who even today, prompted by crude nineteenth-century deformations, see in them nothing but cynicism and mercantilism, the truth is quite different: the most active character of the culture of which they were the symbol was that enthusiasm with a mystical foundation for which the most pious Nicholas V could repeat that to translate a work from the Greek is equivalent to liberating a soul from Purgatory, and spirits most different from one another, the little Ermolao Barbaro all pure philology, Lorenzo Valla all ideological problematic, could find themselves in agreement in admitting almost without criticism (or outside of criticism) that, raised from the barbarism of Arabizing vernacular versions to Ciceronian clarity, Aristotelian thought would have found itself without further ado in a state of proximity to Christian thought; and rulers, inspired by scholars, could exchange as gifts "as a pledge of peace" codices of ancient sages. Confirmation of this is found also in the two great exceptions, Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola, who from this philology wished indeed to rise to a supreme challenge to the impious Peripatos in a new and Platonic theology, and drew upon themselves at once the condemnation of the Church and that of the supreme pontiff of humanism, Erasmus of Rotterdam.

Yet, whatever the later developments of their Platonism, their first move was a humanistic translating confined to Plato, to the Platonists, to the Neoplatonists; and it was also the last, because nothing else remained of them in their wandering and generic disciples, save a great need to read, however it might be, 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 encouraged in the Perugino of the Stanza del Cambio and in the Raphael of the Stanza della Segnatura. To attack it, on the other hand, to deride it, with the old arguments of Julian the Apostate, with a poorly concealed aversion for the divine Latin itself, with an evident sympathy for the Arabist tradition, came the faithful of the Peripatos; a Marzio da Narni, a Pomponazzi. Moreover, as long as the impulse of this culture lasted in the world, that is, until romantic Jansenism, no one thought to pass off as pagans some of the most pious men of our Renaissance; to cite as an example of diabolical pagan doduratio cordis the most pious Sannazzaro who, in order to be buried in the bosom of Mary, had a church dedicated to her built for himself and placed his tomb within it; but on that tomb, with an allegory echoing the other of the Divine Comedy, he wished engraved only the symbols of Wisdom (Minerva and Apollo) and no Christian symbol. Almost the same thing had been done in his little church by Pontano. The other face of this philological humanism was, in short, a veritable mysticism. It is also customary to say that, in their vanity as priests of the spirit, these humanists estranged themselves from country and family in a supranationality sometimes affected. In this there is much exaggeration: the exception of Pontano and his lofty protest would suffice: "Quod maximum inter homines et pulcherrimum est rei publicae administratio." And Coluccio Salutati? And Antonio Loschi? It is not true that in defending with the pen the Chancelleries, the one of the Florentine Commune, the other of the Visconti, they obeyed only personal interests. This does not however prevent an aspiration to supranationality from being intrinsic to their ideology. Which could not fail without humanism also failing; and Torquato Tasso showed himself to be outside it when in his Miuturno he thus had Giacomo Ruscelli not praise but deplore this estrangement from life of the old humanists: "If I am not mistaken, the cause has been weakness of intellect, through which they have not known how to deal with public and private matters together."

Returning then to the beginning, humanism as the opposition of what is within us to what is outside us, of the study of man to the study of nature, as the emancipation of ethical values from critical rationalism, is a Socratic state of mind that can rise again at any moment in generations and in 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 residue. Of this humanistic synthesis the Reformation rejects everything: Latin, which had been its emblem, becomes the luxury and plaything of men of letters; 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 not even in England does humanism manage to survive; the Mores, the Fishers, the Poles close

Catholic humanists the reason for his dissent. And they can be summarized thus: «You, little by little, have ended up placing the Sacred Bible on the same level as the profane one, without however specifying on what foundation. And the dilemma remains open. Either these wise men reached so high because inspired by God, and then you must place them alongside the prophets and the Apostles; or they reached it by their own virtue, and then you cannot prevent the conclusion that for the discovery of the eternal Logos the heart of man suffices and Grace is superfluous». One cannot deny either that in these words there is a kernel of truth or that they strangely resemble those with which Julian the Apostate had begun his battle against humanism.

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

Giuseppe Toffanin