unreasonable.

The Renaissance

The Renaissance is the period from around 1350 to 1650 – from the end of the Middle Ages to the early modern philosophy of Descartes. It was largely a response to the recovery of classical learning from Latin manuscripts unearthed in monasteries, and Greek texts rescued from Constantinople before its fall to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. The complete works of Plato, the summaries of Diogenes Laertius, the Sceptical writings of Sextus Empiricus, and the Epicurean poetry of Lucretius all left their mark on Renaissance thought. This flood of new ideas liberated philosophers from the fossilised forms of scholasticism and the university curricula: suddenly philosophy was pursued most energetically outside the church and by men of the secular world. This liberation would in time lead to the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment. But not for a while: as Bertrand Russell notes,

The first effect of emancipation from the church was not to make men think rationally, but to open their minds to every sort of antique nonsense.

Without the strict limits of church scholasticism, almost anything was open to investigation and philosophers were as likely to appeal to magic as to reason. This limits the philosophical value of some Renaissance thinking; but we may also detect the first stirrings of many modern ideas as the horizons of thought are dramatically widened.

Platonists

For most of the medieval period Plato’s ideas were known only indirectly, transmitted largely through later Neoplatonist thinkers, and from the twelfth century onwards they were comprehensively displaced by the works of Aristotle. In the Renaissance, this situation would be dramatically reversed. Just as the recovery of Aristotle from the Arabic world inspired a surge in philosophy in the thirteenth century, so the discovery of the full corpus of Plato’s works was a revelation in the fifteenth, inspiring new and controversial avenues of thought like the Neoplatonic Christianity of Nicolas of Cusa and the ambitious syntheses emerging from Florence.

Under the patronage of the Medici, Marsilio Ficino translated the complete works of Plato in the 1460s, and even established a new Platonic ‘Academy’ outside Florence. This returned Plato to the centre of Western philosophical activity and inspired a new wave of syncretist attempts to reconcile Greek learning with Christian doctrine. Ficino himself believed that he was promulgating a prisca theologia, an ancient wisdom that had revealed itself at God’s will in different stages and in different cultures: the Persian, Egyptian, Jewish and Greek traditions all had something to contribute to this occult theology.

The urge to reconcile different aspects of the philosophical tradition was taken to an extreme by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Ficino’s most capable student. Pico combined Greek, Cabbalistic, Hermetic, Muslim and Christian ideas into a great Platonic synthesis encapsulated in his 900 Theses. He then proposed a public disputation in Rome in 1487 to defend them. The Pope quickly put a stop to the disputation and condemned several of the theses as heretical – including, unsurprisingly, Pico’s claim that

There is no branch of science which gives us more certainty of Christ’s divinity than magic.

A good example, no doubt, of what Russell condemned as ‘antique nonsense’.

Pico della Mirandola
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola

Pico’s most enduring work, however, is the introduction written for the banned disputation. Known as the Oration on the Dignity of Man, it has been described as the manifesto of the Renaissance, and in its unrestrained celebration of knowledge and human potential it reflects the confidence and energy of the period. Pico describes humans as radically free and able to create themselves however they wish:

We have made you neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, so that with freedom of choice and with honour, as though the maker and moulder of yourself, you may fashion yourself in whatever shape you shall prefer.

Some will live like a brute according to their animal instincts, others develop their rational faculties like a philosopher, some will even become as one with God. In the great chain of being, we choose our own position. The notion is curiously reminiscent of twentieth-century Existentialism: existence, Sartre would declare, precedes essence. The mercurial Pico, who died aged 31 a follower of the rigidly orthodox Savonarola, was the very embodiment of that idea.

Humanists

The revival of interest in the classical world, and the recovery of its literature, was at the heart of a broader social and academic programme known as Renaissance humanism. Already in the fourteenth century Petrarch was searching out ancient manuscripts and praising the effects of classical learning: his model in all respects – moral, political and stylistic – was the Roman orator Cicero. With the invention of printing in the fifteenth century, accurate texts became widely available and the humanist programme came to dominate Renaissance teaching and learning. Medici Florence was the de facto capital of this new spirit of enquiry, but its effects were felt across Europe.

Another Florentine, Niccolò Machiavelli, brought a distinctly Renaissance temperament to political philosophy. Having prospered under, and then suffered from, the social upheavals in Florence at the end of the fifteenth century, Machiavelli retired to the country to write about politics. His immediate model is the Roman historian Livy, and in his Discourses he uses Livy to defend the popular liberty of the ancient Roman Republic, an ideal that has come to be known as civic humanism.

But Machiavelli is most famous, or notorious, for writing The Prince, published posthumously in 1532. In this short handbook of power, he unflinchingly advocates deception and violence as tools to achieve and retain political authority. For Machiavelli, the end justifies the means; reasons of state trump all other considerations, religious and moral. In its separation of politics from religion, The Prince is an early statement of secularism. For this reason it was, and can still be, shocking in its brutal pragmatism. A few quotations from chapters 17-18 will illustrate:

To be feared is much safer than to be loved.

Men are quicker to forget the death of a father than the loss of an inheritance.

One must be a fox to recognise snares, and a lion to frighten wolves.

You must be a great liar and hypocrite.

Furthermore, Machiavelli is willing to praise unsavoury characters like Pope Alexander VI and his son, Cesare Borgia. And yet scholars differ on the book’s true intentions: is Machiavelli being opportunistic or philosophical? merely cynical or refreshingly frank? is his advocacy of violence ironic or just realpolitik? The author’s reputation is similarly ambiguous: there are as many versions of ‘Old Nick’ as there are commentators.

The recovery of philosophical ideas from Greece and Rome also inspired new strains of humanist thinking. Caught up in the religious wars of the Counter-Reformation, the Flemish humanist Justus Lipsius turned to the Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca for guidance and consolation. Lipsius wedded Stoic ideals to Christian virtue in an influential moral theory known as Neostoicism. The discovery of Lucretius’ great poem On the Nature of Things in 1417 restored Epicureanism as an object of philosophical interest, and would come to influence modern atomism in the 17th century. And the discovery of Sceptical texts, especially the comprehensive collections of Sextus Empiricus in 1562, had a lasting impact on European thought.

In France, Michel de Montaigne was deeply impressed by the arguments of the Sceptics. In 107 Essais he explores and undermines a huge range of contemporary assumptions, drawing attention to the fallibility of the senses and the limits of reason. Preferring an open-minded pluralism to the dogmatism of the Middle Ages, he wonders about the intellectual lives of animals; the customs and practices of foreign peoples; the contradictions and varieties of religious worship; and the vast range of human beliefs, tastes and desires. By amassing a large, unsystematic but fruitful assortment of facts and opinions, he demonstrates that all human enquiry is condemned to ignorance and uncertainty.

Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne

Scepticism had once again became a vital part of the European tradition. 50 years after Montaigne’s death, at the dawn of modern philosophy, Descartes would famously rehearse several sceptical arguments in his first Meditation.

Reformers

When Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg in 1517, he set in motion the Protestant Reformation. Although primarily a theological upheaval, the substance and rhetoric of the Reformation were rooted in philosophical questions about free will, knowledge and salvation that had also exercised the scholastics.

Luther was a monk and, like Augustine, he was preoccupied with the sinfulness of humans and the possibility of their salvation. His 95 Theses were largely a protest against the church’s doctrine of redemption and grace: for Luther, grace is God’s gift, and not dependent on indulgences or the intercession of priests or saints. It is only through faith that we are forgiven, only through God’s grace that we are saved. In a famous and public argument with Erasmus, Luther denied the existence of human free will in these matters as incompatible with God’s foreknowledge and providence.

Luther was no friend to philosophy: he despised Aristotle and declared that ‘reason is the Devil’s greatest whore’. Philosophy is a wretched thing, likely to mislead and obscure, and truth is to be found in Scripture alone. Still, Luther was willing to use scholastic arguments to make his point, and recognised that philosophy does have a humble role in the service of theology. It is perhaps not surprising, therefore, that the questions raised by Luther and the other Reformers could only be settled through violence and the religious wars which would rage through continental Europe for several decades.

Aristotelians

The medieval programme did not cease overnight. In fact, the Renaissance saw something of a revival of Aristotelian thinking, based on closer readings of the original texts and leading to fresh interpretations. In a short work On the immortality of the soul published in 1516, Pietro Pomponazzi argued, using the concepts of Aristotle and in large part of Thomas Aquinas, that the human soul cannot be immortal. Even in its intellectual form, the soul is a function of the human body and therefore should not survive physical death. Pomponazzi hedged his religious bets: the immortality of the soul was an item of faith, even though it was not a truth supported by reasoned argument. Nevertheless, the work became something of a Renaissance cause célèbre. Aristotelian natural philosophy had been the bedrock of Catholic orthodoxy for over two hundred years: now Pomponazzi had shown that philosophy was not quite the obedient handmaid to theology that the church wanted.

A particularly rich vein of Aristotelian philosophy came from the Jesuits, a Catholic order founded in 1540 in response to the Protestant Reformation. At the Jesuit School of Salamanca, Luis de Molina defended Catholic notions of radical free will against the determinism of the Protestant reformers. His most important contribution was the theory of scientia media or middle knowledge. Between God’s knowledge of what must be, and his knowledge of what is, this ‘middle knowledge’ involves what could be – what all possible creatures would choose in all possible circumstances. This knowledge is independent of God’s will, and so allows God to know what humans will do, without affecting their freedom to act. Francisco Suárez argued that political authority is of human origin and denied the divine right of kings, involving himself in a public argument with King James I of England who banned and burned Suárez’s treatise.

Jesuit schools were established across Catholic Europe, with a mission to combine the new humanism and the scholastic programme based on Aristotle. The Jesuits would educate some of the greatest minds of the early modern period, including Galileo, Descartes, Montesquieu, Voltaire and Diderot.

Giordano Bruno

Perhaps the most audacious thinker of the Renaissance was Giordano Bruno. Bruno joined the scholarly Dominican order as a teenager, but became a fugitive when he fell under suspicion of heresy. For fifteen years he travelled through Europe as an itinerant teacher but regularly caused offence with his unorthodox ideas, and was eventually excommunicated by the Catholic, Calvinist and Lutheran churches. After returning to Italy, he was detained by the Roman Inquisition and executed in 1600 after 8 years in prison.

Like Ficino and Pico, Bruno saw himself as unearthing an authentic ancient wisdom; but for Bruno, that wisdom had only been obscured or debased by the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, and indeed by Christian Scripture. Bruno had little respect for any classical or Christian authority, except the most ancient Orphic and Pythagorean texts, and the (even earlier) Egyptian and Babylonian traditions. Consequently, he was prepared to doubt or reject any aspect of church doctrine.

Bruno’s eclectic ‘new philosophy’ started from Copernicus’ theory that the earth orbits the sun, recently published in 1543. This was an unqualified rejection of the concentric, symmetrical order of Aristotle’s universe. Rather, Bruno’s new universe is infinite and without a centre; the stars are distant suns with planetary systems like our own, no doubt supporting their own forms of life. This universe is the pantheistic embodiment of an infinite God – a notion that anticipates Spinoza’s identification of God as Nature. In defiance of Christian teachings concerning original sin and ignorance, Bruno had enormous confidence in the capacity of humans to discover and understand this natural universe. Like Nietzsche, he despised and mocked a church which turned its back on scientific enquiry and renounced this world for the next.

Bruno was burned at the stake in Rome in 1600. The church would retain its intellectual authority for a while longer: Galileo would be arrested 30 years later, and Descartes would consequently withhold publication of his own early work. But this stranglehold on orthodoxy would soon be loosened by the onset of the Enlightenment, and in 1889 a statue was erected on the site of Bruno’s execution, facing defiantly towards the Vatican.

Giordano Bruno
Statue of Bruno in Campo de’ Fiori

Bruno died for his ideas. He is often held up as a martyr to science, but as Kenny notes,

His speculations were based not on observation or experiment but on occult traditions and on a priori philosophising. He was condemned not because he supported the Copernican system, but because he practised magic and denied the divinity of Christ.

In his boundless confidence, his comprehensive learning, and indeed his interest in magic and the occult, Giordano Bruno is a typical product of the Renaissance. But he was writing on the eve of the scientific revolution, and his audacious speculations about an infinite universe and a plurality of inhabited worlds sound strangely modern.

For all its energy and daring, the Renaissance has usually left historians of philosophy unimpressed. Some have been inclined to see it as largely an extension of the Middle Ages, still medieval in its outlook. Others have cautiously identified the beginnings of modernity. Russell’s assessment is typical:

The Renaissance was not a period of great achievement in philosophy, but it did certain things which were essential preliminaries to the greatness of the seventeenth century. In the first place it broke down the rigid scholastic system, which had become an intellectual straightjacket. It revived the study of Plato, and thereby demanded at least so much independent thought as was required for choosing between him and Aristotle. In regard to both, it promoted a genuine and first-hand knowledge, free from the glosses of Neoplatonists and Arabic commentators. More important still, it encouraged the habit of regarding intellectual activity as a delightful social adventure, not a cloistered meditation aiming at the preservation of a predetermined orthodoxy.

The Renaissance offers a glimpse of the whole scope of human thought: pagan and Christian, ancient and modern, sceptical and dogmatic, magical and scientific, confident and pessimistic, the rigidly orthodox and the shockingly heretical – all jostle for attention. Perhaps it is not the most important chapter in the story of philosophy, but it is certainly the most colourful.

Sources

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