Thus Petrarch began the reeducation of Europe. Direct intercourse with the great masters of Latin and Greek literature was to be the key to the radical expansion of the contemporary European mind. Not just Christian theology but classical litterae humaniores could now be recognized as a source of spiritual insight and moral development. While Church learning had become increasingly intellectualized and abstract, Petrarch felt the need for a learning that would better reflect the conflicts and vagaries of man’s emotional and imaginative depths. Rather than doctrinal formulae for describing man and clerical austerities for educating him, Petrarch turned to undogmatic introspection and observation for his insights into the human condition, and a full life of literature and action, as well as monastic solitude, for his education. Studia humanitatis were differentiated from, and elevated to the level of, studia divinitatis. Now, under the revived classical model, poetry and rhetoric, style, eloquence, and persuasiveness again became worthy ends in themselves, the necessary accompaniments of moral power. For Petrarch, grace and clarity of literary expression reflected grace and clarity of the soul. In the slow, meticulous labor of working with words and ideas, in the sensitive exploration of each nuance of emotion and perception, the literary discipline became a spiritual discipline, a striving for artistic perfection that demanded a parallel perfecting of the soul.
While Dante’s sensibility had in a sense culminated and summed up the medieval era, Petrarch’s looked forward to and impelled a future age, bringing a rebirth of culture, creativity, and human greatness. While Dante’s poetic work was done in the reverent spirit of the anonymous artisans and craftsmen who built the medieval cathedrals, inspired by God and created for his greater glory, Petrarch’s work was motivated by a new spirit, inspired by the ancients and created for the enrichment and greater glory of man himself, the noble center of God’s creation. While Dante and the Scholastics were focused on theological precision and scientific knowledge of the natural world, Petrarch was instead engaged by the depths and complexities of his own consciousness. Rather than spiritual and scientific system building, his focus was psychological, humanist, and aesthetic.
Not that Petrarch was unspiritual or even unorthodox; in the end, his Christianity was as devout and firmly rooted as his classicism. Augustine was as important as Virgil for Petrarch, and like all the other notable synthesizers of the two traditions, he believed Christianity to be the divine fulfillment of the classical promise. Petrarch’s highest ideal was docta pietas, learned piety. Piety was Christian, directed to God, yet learning enhanced that piety, and learning derived from knowledge of the ancient classics. The two streams—Christianity and classical culture—formed a deep harmony, and man achieved a larger spiritual vision when he drank from both. In Petrarch’s view, when Cicero spoke of “one single God as the governor and maker of all things,” he did so “not in a merely philosophical but in an almost Catholic manner of phrasing it, so that sometimes you would think you were hearing not a pagan philosopher but an apostle.”
What was new in the late Middle Ages was not any lack of spirituality in Petrarch, but rather the overall character of his approach to human life. The demands of his religious temperament were in continuous creative battle with his desire for romantic and sensuous love, for secular activity in diplomatic and courtly circles, for literary greatness and personal glory. It was this new self-reflective awareness of human life’s richness and multidimensionality, and his recognition of a kindred spirit in the great writers of antiquity, that made Petrarch the first man of the Renaissance.
The Return of Plato
Inspired by Petrarch’s call, large numbers of scholars took up the search for the lost manuscripts of antiquity. Whatever they discovered was then carefully collated, edited, and translated to provide as accurate and substantial a basis as possible for their humanistic mission. This activity coincided with more frequent contacts with the Byzantine world, which had preserved much of the Greek heritage intact, and whose scholars started leaving Constantinople for the West under the threat of the Turkish invasion. Western scholars began to study and master the Greek language, and there soon arrived in Italy the Greek Dialogues of Plato, the Enneads of Plotinus, and other major works of the Platonic tradition and classical Greek culture.
The West’s sudden access to these writings precipitated a Platonic revival not unlike the earlier rediscovery of Aristotle. Platonism, of course, had permeated Christian thought in the West from the earliest years of the Middle Ages, passed on first by Augustine and Boethius, and later through the ninth-century philosopher John Scotus Erigena and his translation of and commentaries on the works of Dionysius the Areopagite. Platonism was revivified in the schools at Chartres and Saint-Victor in the twelfth-century renascence, and was plainly visible in the mystical philosophy of Meister Eckhart. Even the high Scholastic tradition of Albertus and Aquinas, although necessarily focused on the challenge of integrating Aristotle, was nevertheless still deeply Platonic in disposition. But this had always been an indirect Plato, highly Christianized, modified through Augustine and the other Church fathers: a Plato known from afar, largely untranslated, passed on by digests and references in another language and mind-set and seldom in his own words. Petrarch himself, eager for a Platonic revival on the basis of allusions in Cicero and Augustine, did not in the fourteenth century have the necessary translators. The recovery of the original Greek works was a fresh revelation for fifteenth-century Western Europe, and Humanists such as Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola devoted themselves wholeheartedly to the transmission of this stream to their contemporaries.
The Platonic tradition provided the Humanists with a philosophical basis highly compatible with their own intellectual habits and aspirations. Rather than the syllogistic hairsplitting and cerebral abstractness of the later Scholastics in the universities, Platonism offered a richly textured tapestry of imaginative depth and spiritual exaltation. The notion that beauty was an essential component in the search for the ultimate reality, that imagination and vision were more significant in that quest than logic and dogma, that man could attain a direct knowledge of things divine—such ideas held much attraction for the new sensibility growing in Europe. Moreover, Plato’s dialogues were themselves refined literary masterpieces, not the stodgy treatises of the Aristotelian-Scholastic tradition, and thus appealed to the Humanists’ passion for rhetorical eloquence and aesthetic persuasiveness.
Both Aristotle and Aquinas had been rigidified by the late Scholastics, losing much of their allure for the new Humanists. Late Scholasticism thrived in an academic atmosphere marked by qualities that often exaggerated to the point of caricature Aquinas’s almost superhuman intellectual precision and analytical rigor. The open-ended intellectual curiosity displayed by Aristotle and Aquinas in their own times had produced bodies of thought that were eventually transformed by their respectful successors into closed, complete, and inflexible systems. The very success and breadth of Aquinas’s work left little for his followers to do but replow the same ground. A too reverential awe of the master’s words inevitably lessened the possibility of creative scholarship. Even where conflict and criticism existed, as between Thomists, Scotists, and Ockhamists, the Scholastic dialogue seemed to outsiders to have degenerated into ceaseless argument over sterile subtleties. The via moderna initiated by Ockham was especially prone to such minute controversy, where the search for terminological accuracy and the concern with formal logic displaced the via antiqua’s interest in metaphysical comprehensiveness. And after the brilliance of Ockham, Buridan, Oresme, and their contemporaries in the fourteenth century, the via moderna itself had lost much of its original impetus. By the fifteenth century, Scholasticism’s intellectual nerve was failing. The influx of the Platonic tradition thus signified a fresh and expansive wind revitalizing European thought. With the universities trapped in a backwater of intellectual orthodoxy, a Platonic Academy was founded in Florence in the second half of the fifteenth century, under the patronage of
Cosimo de Medici and the leadership of Ficino, and this became the flourishing center of the Platonic revival.
In Platonism and Neoplatonism the Humanists discovered a non-Christian spiritual tradition possessing a religious and ethical profundity seemingly comparable to that of Christianity itself. The Neoplatonic corpus implied the existence of a universal religion, of which Christianity was perhaps the ultimate but not the only manifestation. Erasmus, pressing further the spirit of Petrarch’s view of Cicero, wrote of his difficulty in refraining from praying to Socrates as to a saint. The Humanists’ suddenly expanded reading lists gave evidence of a tradition of learning, of intellectual, spiritual, and imaginative insight, that found expression not only in the classical Greeks but throughout civilized history—in the Hermetic corpus, in Zoroastrian oracles, in the Hebrew Kaballah, in Babylonian and Egyptian texts—a cross-cultural revelation that bespoke a Logos that manifested itself continually and universally.
With the influx of this tradition came a new vision of man, nature, and the divine. Neoplatonism, based on Plotinus’s conception of the world as an emanation from the transcendent One, portrayed nature as permeated by divinity, a noble expression of the World Soul. Stars and planets, light, plants, even stones possessed a numinous dimension. Neoplatonist Humanists declared the light of the Sun to be the light of God, as Christ was the light of the world, with all of creation thereby bathed in divinity and with the Sun itself, the source of light and life, possessing divine attributes. The ancient Pythagorean vision of a universe ordered according to transcendent mathematical forms received an intense renewal of interest, and promised to reveal nature as permeated by a mystical intelligence whose language was number and geometry. The garden of the world was again enchanted, with magical powers and transcendent meanings implicit in every part of nature.
The Humanists’ Neoplatonic conception of man was equally exalted. Possessing a divine spark, man was capable of discovering within himself the image of the infinite deity. He was a noble microcosm of the divine macrocosm. Ficino asserted in his Platonic Theology that man not only was “the vicar of God” in the great extent of his earthly powers, but was of “almost the same genius as the Author of the heavens” in the range of his intelligence. The devoutly Christian Ficino even went on to praise man’s soul for being capable “by means of the intellect and will, as by those twin Platonic wings … of becoming in a sense all things, and even a god.”
With man now attaining, in the light of the revivified classical past, a new consciousness of his noble role in the universe, a new sense of history arose as well. The Humanists embraced the ancient Greco-Roman conception of history as cyclical, rather than only linear as in the traditional Judaeo-Christian vision; they saw their own period as a rebirth out of the barbarian darkness of the Middle Ages, a return to ancient glory, the dawn of another golden age. In the vision of the Neoplatonic Humanists, this world was not so fallen as it had been for Moses or Augustine, and neither was man.
Perhaps the young and brilliant Pico della Mirandola best summed up this new spirit of religious syncretism, broad scholarship, and optimistic reclamation of man’s potential divinity. In 1486, at the age of twenty-three, Pico announced his intention to defend nine hundred theses derived from various Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and Arabic writers, invited scholars from all over Europe to Rome for a public disputation, and composed for the event his celebrated Oration on the Dignity of Man. In it Pico described the Creation using both Genesis and the Timaeus as initial sources, but then went further: When God had completed the creation of the world as a sacred temple of his divine wisdom, he at last considered the creation of man, whose role would be to reflect on, admire, and love the immense grandeur of God’s work. But God found he had no archetypes remaining with which to make man, and he therefore said to his last creation:
Neither an established place, nor a form belonging to you alone, nor any special function have We given to you, O Adam, and for this reason, that you may have and possess, according to your desire and judgment, whatever place, whatever form, and whatever functions you shall desire. The nature of other creatures, which has been determined, is confined within the bounds prescribed by Us. You, who are confined by no limits, shall determine for yourself your own nature, in accordance with your own free will, in whose hand I have placed you. I have set you at the center of the world, so that from there you may more easily survey whatever is in the world. We have made you neither heavenly nor earthly, neither mortal nor immortal, so that, more freely and more honorably the molder and maker of yourself, you may fashion yourself in whatever form you shall prefer. You shall be able to descend among the lower forms of being, which are brute beasts; you shall be able to be reborn out of the judgment of your own soul into the higher beings, which are divine.9
To man had been given freedom, mutability, and the power of self-transformation: thus Pico affirmed that, in the ancient mysteries, man had been symbolized as the great mythic figure of Prometheus. God had bestowed to man the ability to determine freely his position in the universe, even to the point of ascending to full union with the supreme God. The classical Greeks’ sense of man’s own glory, of man’s intellectual powers and capacity for spiritual elevation seemingly uncontaminated by a biblical Original Sin, was now emerging anew in the breast of Western man.
The new mode of attaining knowledge of the universe was different as well. Imagination now rose to the highest position on the epistemological spectrum, unrivaled in its capacity to render metaphysical truth. Through the disciplined use of imagination man could bring to his consciousness those transcendent living Forms that ordered the universe. Thus could the mind recover its own deepest organization and reunite itself with the cosmos. In contrast to the Scholastics, with their increasing empiricism and concretism, the Neoplatonic Humanists saw archetypal meaning in each concrete fact, used myths as vehicles for communicating metaphysical and psychological insights, and were ever observant for the hidden significance of things.
Following Neoplatonism’s integration of astrology and inclusion of the pagan gods in the hierarchy of reality, Renaissance Humanists began employing the pantheon of planetary deities as modes of imaginative discourse. Prominent Scholastics such as the fourteenth-century nominalist Oresme had opposed astrologers’ predictive claims, but with the Humanists’ influence astrology again flourished—in the Florentine Academy, in royal courts and aristocratic circles, in the Vatican. The Judaeo-Christian God still reigned supreme, but the Greco-Roman gods and goddesses were now given new life and value in the scheme of things. Horoscopes abounded, and references to the planetary powers and zodiacal symbols became ubiquitous. It is true that mythology, astrology, and esotericism had never been absent from even orthodox medieval culture: allegories and artistic images, the planetary names for the days of the week, the classification of the elements and humors, and many other aspects of the liberal arts and sciences all reflected their continuing presence. But now they were rediscovered in a new light that served to revivify their classical status. The gods regained a sacred dignity, their forms portrayed in paintings and sculptures with a beauty and sensuousness resembling that of the ancient images. Classical mythology began to be regarded as the noble religious truth of those who lived before Christ, as a theology in itself, so that its study became another form of docta pietas. The pagan Venus, goddess of beauty, was restored as the symbol of spiritual beauty, an archetype in the divine Mind that mediated the soul’s awakening to divine love—and as such could be identified as an alternative manifestation of the Virgin Mary. Platonic images and doctrines were reconceived in Christian terms, the Greek deities and daimones seen as Christian angels, Socrates’s teacher in the Symposium, Diotima, recognized as inspired by the Holy Spirit. A flexible syncretism was emerging, encompassing diverse traditions and perspectives, with Platonism espoused as a new gospel.
Thus while Scholasticism had energetically forwarded the rational mind in the Aristotelian tradition, and while the evang
elical orders and Rhineland mystics had nurtured the spiritual heart in the primitive Christian tradition, Humanism now evoked the imaginative intelligence of the Platonic tradition, all of these developments directed in their different ways toward reestablishing man’s relation to the divine. Humanism gave man new dignity, nature new meaning, and Christianity new dimensions—and yet less absoluteness. Indeed, man, nature, and the classical heritage were all divinized in the Humanist perception, which provoked a radical expansion of human vision and activity far beyond the medieval horizon, threatening the old order in ways the Humanists did not fully anticipate.
For with the rediscovery of such a sophisticated and viable yet non-Christian spiritual tradition, the absolute uniqueness of the Christian revelation was relativized and the Church’s spiritual authority implicitly undermined. Moreover, the Humanists’ celebration of interiority and the riches of the individual human imagination overstepped the dogmatic bounds of the Church’s traditional forms of spirituality, which abjured an unrestrained private imagination as dangerous in favor of institutionally defined ritual, prayer, and meditation on the mysteries of Christian doctrine. Similarly, Neoplatonism’s assertion of the immanent divinity of all nature confronted the orthodox Judaeo-Christian tendency to uphold God’s absolute transcendence, his utterly unique divinity which was revealed only in special places like Mount Sinai or Golgotha in a distant biblical past. And especially disturbing were the polytheistic implications of Neoplatonic Humanist writings, in which references to Venus, Saturn, or Prometheus seemed to signify something more than allegorical conveniences.
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