Humanism and the Reformation

12 Key excerpts on "Humanism and the Reformation"

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  Culture and Values

  A Survey of the Humanities, Volume II

  • Lawrence Cunningham, John Reich, Lois Fichner-Rathus, , Lawrence Cunningham, John Reich, Lois Fichner-Rathus(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  uniform, fixed text and form. They are easily confused if a teacher employs one form now and another form—perhaps with the intention of making improvements—later on. In this way all the time and labor will be lost. Renaissance Humanism and the Reformation The relationship between Renaissance humanism and the Prot- estant Reformation is significant, if complex. Luther had no early contact with the “new learning,” even though he utilized its fruits. Nevertheless, humanism as far back as the time of Petrarch shared many intellectual and cultural sentiments with the Reformation. The reformers and the humanists shared several religious aversions. They were both fiercely critical of monasticism, the decadent character of popular devotion to the saints, the low intellectual preparation of the clergy, and the general venality and corruption of the higher clergy, especially the papal curia— the body of tribunals and assemblies through which the pope governed the church. Both the humanists and the reformers felt that the scho- lastic theology of the universities had degenerated into quib- bling arguments, meaningless discussions, and dry academic exercises bereft of intellectual or spiritual significance. They preferred Christian writers of an earlier age. John Cal- vin’s reverence in the 16th century for the writings of Saint Augustine (354–430) echoed the devotion of Petrarch in the 14th century. Humanists and reformers alike spearheaded a move toward a better understanding of the Bible—one based not on the authority of theological interpretation but on close, criti- cal scrutiny of the text, preferably in the original Hebrew and Greek. Mastery of the three biblical languages (Latin, Greek, and Hebrew) was considered so important in the 16th century that schools—including Corpus Christi College, Oxford; the University of Alcalá, Spain; and the Collège de France in Paris— were founded for instruction in them.

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  The Humanist World of Renaissance Florence

  • Brian Jeffrey Maxson(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  Introduction A Social Conception of the Humanist Movement From limited origins in thirteenth-century Padua the humanist studies of a handful of men and women exploded into a cultural and educational movement that reached across Europe and lasted for centuries. Writers like Petrarch, Bruni, and Erasmus became famous for their unparalleled mastery of the languages and writings of the ancient world. The humanists offered Europe a new focus for study, new approach to problems, and new style in which people could express themselves. But humanist studies and writings did more than change the way a few intellectuals discussed esoteric questions or alter the costume in which they dressed their words. Humanism introduced fundamental changes to the ways people viewed the world and interacted with one another. Humanism reintroduced the texts to the West that made possible the voyages of exploration, the Protestant Reformations, and the scientific revolution. Humanist innova- tions lie at the foundation of countless modern academic disciplines, including history, for which fifteenth-century humanist historians devel- oped philological and evidentiary techniques that continue to inform historical research. The humanists’ focus on the lives of people in and outside the forum underlay their success. From the most basic perspective, humanists sought to inspire moral virtue in their contemporaries by encouraging the study of ethics, the emulation or avoidance of examples from history – and to a lesser extent literature – and a firm knowledge of the grammatical and rhetorical tools necessary to move others to their opinion of the morally correct point of view. Theoretically, political men and women, teachers, businesspeople, members of the church, and anyone else with the means to acquire humanist training could integrate their learning in their political, 1 business, social, and all other dealings with people.

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  God's Philosophers

  How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science

  • James Hannam(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Icon Books

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 14 Humanism and the Reformation

  By the time Constantinople fell in 1453, the Pope was back in Rome after his sojourn in Avignon and better still, there was only one of him. However, the popes of the late fifteenth century were among the worst in history. They battled for secular power in Italy while using the wealth of the Church to fund lavish parties and building projects. The Vatican was a den of vice and corruption. On the plus side, the profligacy of the papacy and the rest of the Italian nobility provided the funds necessary to produce the artistic jewels of quattrocento Italy as each city tried to outdo the others in flamboyance. The best painters, sculptors and architects were held in high esteem and the need to produce more and more remarkable art drove innovation. Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446) designed the spectacular dome that tops Florence’s cathedral and was the first to codify the technique of perspective.1 Painting was further improved when vegetable oil became the medium of choice for artists. Oil paints allowed for a greater depth of colour than the earlier egg-based pigments. All these innovations resulted in art so dazzling that later generations dubbed the entire period the Renaissance.

  The Rise of Humanism

  As we have already seen, historians have a tendency to give value-laden names to historical periods. These help to fix popular perceptions of the period in question. And, if the name catches on, other historians co-opt it to their own periods. We have met two renaissances so far, the Carolingian renaissance under the Emperor Charlemagne and the resurgence of scholarship during the twelfth century. The period that everybody means by ‘the’ Renaissance lasted roughly from the late fourteenth to the early sixteenth century. The French historian Jules Michelet (1798–1874) first coined the term in the 1850s, but it took Jacob Burckhardt (1818–97) from Switzerland to turn it into common currency in his seminal work The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy (1860).2 Michelet and Burckhardt both strongly contrasted the rebirth of culture in the fifteenth century with medieval stagnation. As Burckhardt claimed: ‘In the Middle Ages, both sides of the human consciousness lay dreaming or half awake beneath a common veil.’3

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  Please Don't Wish Me a Merry Christmas

  A Critical History of the Separation of Church and State

  • Stephen M Feldman, Stephen M. Feldman(Authors)
  • 1998(Publication Date)
  • NYU Press

    (Publisher)

  HAPTER 4The Christian Renaissance and Reformation in Continental Europe

  THE RENAISSANCE

  Toward the end of the Middle Ages, certain Italian cities such as Venice and Florence, spurred by fortuitous economic prosperity, strove for independence from the Holy Roman Empire.1 Already, in the mid-fourteenth century, Bartolus argued that the free people of the cities (or city republics) were exercising de facto merum Imperium (the highest power to make laws), so they effectively constituted sibi princeps (a prince unto themselves). During this era, though, the cities had to remain wary of papal domination, and thus many writers, such as Dante, still sided with the emperor to avoid the pope. Other writers nonetheless insisted that the Church should not interfere in the secular affairs of the cities. As early as 1324, Marsiglio of Padua anticipated a central Reformation theme when he argued that the city republics had secular jurisdiction separate from the Church. While the fate of these city republics fluctuated over the years, they provided fertile political soil for the growth of a modern theory of the state.2

  In particular, the civic humanism of the Renaissance bloomed during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Just as Thomas Aquinas previously had turned to Aristotelian theory to develop the concept of the state, the early civic humanists turned to Cicero. The humanist emphasis on the Ciceronian concept of virtus—the single or highest virtue, uniting wisdom with eloquence—contrasted sharply with the Augustinian Christian view of human nature. Whereas Augustinians saw only human depravity and sin, the humanists believed people, as citizens, could achieve excellence in political and civil society. Nonetheless, the early humanists remained fervent Christians, struggling to force their ideas of virtus into a Christian framework, and the later Northern humanists even insisted that political rulers possess the godliness of a good Christian.3

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  The Broadview Anthology of British Literature Volume 2: The Renaissance and the Early Seventeenth Century - Third Edition

  • Joseph Black, Leonard Conolly, Kate Flint, Isobel Grundy, Wendy Lee, Don LePan, Roy Liuzza, Jerome J. McGann, Anne Lake Prescott, Barry V. Qualls, Jason Rudy, Claire Waters(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Broadview Press

    (Publisher)

  The opposite is the case with Renaissance humanism, particularly north of Italy. Humanists were distinguished from other scholars not by exclusive focus on human or secular texts, but rather by their focus on secular writings, particularly classical ones, as well as on religious texts and thought. Thus Erasmus produced books on Greco-Roman culture and editions of the New Testament in the original Greek and of works by patristic writers. In one key particular, humanism was in accord with Protestant thought: Erasmus and many other humanists supported making the Bible available in the vernacular. But—as attested by Thomas More’s willingness to die rather than approve England’s separation from the Roman Catholic Church—humanists tended to be more willing than Luther or, later, Calvin to remain connected to Roman Catholic tradition. (Erasmus, for example, favored reform within the Catholic Church but opposed a full Protestant Reformation.) The recovery and reappraisal of works from classical Greece and Rome was central to Renaissance humanism —as it had been to medieval scholasticism centuries earlier. The recovery of texts by the scholastics, however, had stressed applying classical learning to theological ends, emphasized Aristotle’s works, and tended to treat classical writings as authoritative. For Renaissance humanists, classical writings were of interest for many purposes: the epic poems of Homer and Virgil and the erotic poems of Ovid were of as much interest as the writings of the philosophers. And many humanists felt little obligation to demonstrate that a seemingly new idea in fact accorded with ancient authority. Renais-sance humanism was often prepared to break new ground, and to acknowledge breaking it. Of the Greek philosophers, Plato, rather than Aristotle, came to the fore.

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  The Devil and Secular Humanism

  The Children of the Enlightenment

  • Howard Radest(Author)
  • 1990(Publication Date)
  • Praeger

    (Publisher)

  3 Religions of Humanity: Rationalism, Free Thought, and Ethical Culture It takes no unusual skill to find Humanist echoes in any culture or any civilization. But the Humanism we meet today is rooted in a particular experience—the arrival of democratic revolutions, modern science and tech- nology, and an urban industrial society. Suddenly, at least as historical time is measured, what was once the possession of a privileged intellectual class became—in its dreams if not in its realities—a popular possibility. Human- ism left the salon for the market place. The Humanism that grew from the arts and humanities and the Humanism that had a religious, scientific, and political center grew apart. The former lingered in the academy and among those for whom human powers had an aesthetic and necessarily limited appeal. 1 The latter found its home in those great nineteenth-century ar- guments concerning heaven and earth, creation and evolution, nature and nurture, and freedom and equality. To be sure, a common tie bound them together; both celebrated human abilities and expected a great deal from human nature. Inevitably, they spoke in different voices and, as they evolved, to different people. The point of separation was the Enlightenment; the impulse to separation was modern empirical science. An aesthetic Humanism could and did make its peace with God and the Church; indeed some of its greatest achievements were embedded in a sacred vocabulary. The arts of the Renaissance still today provide living testimony to the fact that God's creature was manifestly able to be both creation and creator. Modern Humanism, the Humanism of the market place and the laboratory, set itself upon a different path. Still, whether classical or modern, it was the intellectuals and not popular culture 32 THE DEVIL AMD SECULAR HUMANISM that carried the message. And it was among the intellectuals and their hangers-on that the rationalism and radicalism of an Enlightenment politics developed.

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  The New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson

  • Greg Clingham(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  chapter 3 Johnson and Renaissance Humanism Anthony W. Lee What is humanism? Correctly speaking, plural responses are required to answer that question. We have the broadly subjective and relativistic human- ism of the pre-Socratic philosopher Protagoras: “Man is the measure of all things,” as well as more recent iterations: the anti-modernist conservatism of the early-twentieth-century New Humanists (Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More); the atheistic humanist existentialism of John-Paul Sartre; and, more recently, Donna Haraway’s cyborg humanism. The present chapter uses the term to refer to the European-wide cultural flowering of the Renaissance. The genealogy of this movement extends at least as far back as Cicero’s studium humanitatis (which itself harkens back to the model Greek educa- tion, paedeia), denoting a liberal arts education, 1 and an afterlife reaching later authors such as John Dryden and Samuel Johnson. European Renaissance humanism – a literary, intellectual, and cultural “movement” roughly spanning the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries, from Petrarch to Milton, from Italy to Britain – has two major distinguishing characteristics: (1) reverence for learning and books of the past, especially classical (Greek and Roman) literature; and (2) a focused effort to bring the wisdom of earlier authors to bear on contemporary life. My concern is primarily with the backward-looking Johnson, whose focus may be seen in a representative text such as Adventurer 58 (1753), where he writes of “the authors of antiquity”: [T]hose whose works have been the delight of ages, and transmitted as the great inheritance of mankind from one generation to another: surely, no man can, without the utmost arrogance, imagine, that he brings any superiority of understanding to the perusal of those books which have been preserved in the devastation of cities, and snatched up from the I wish to thank Robert G.

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  The God That Did Not Fail

  How Religion Built and Sustains the West

  • Robert Royal(Author)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Encounter Books

    (Publisher)

  3

  There were various continuities between the medieval and the Renaissance ideas of a humanist, but notable differences as well.4 To begin with, since theology, law, medicine, and the sciences began to develop as professions and distinct university faculties, they did not exactly address the more general interests of the humanists. These fell into what had been called the studia humanitatis (“studies of humanity”) in antiquity. Medieval universities had proposed a list of basic studies divided into the trivium (grammar, dialectic, rhetoric) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, music), but the schools, libraries, and universities dedicated to Renaissance humanism proposed five areas of study: grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry, and moral philosophy. As this bare list indicates, humanism was less concerned with theoretical speculation than with practical and moral questions, but not to the exclusion of religious matters.

  The main figures of the early Italian Renaissance clearly show as much, though there is naturally greater or lesser engagement with spiritual questions from one of them to another. What this means can be seen quite early, even in a precursor such as Francesco Petrarca (English: Petrarch, 1304-1374). Petrarch was religiously an Augustinian in the sense that—like the Franciscans, the Ockhamists, Luther, and others—he did not have much interest in the kind of theoretical theology, usually based in Aristotle, that was common in the Middle Ages. Petrarch is most famous for work that he himself regarded as of small value: the love sonnets and lyric poetry he composed in Italian. His more serious work, as he saw it, lay in the composition of moral treatises, letters, and even an epic poem, all in Latin, intended literally to resurrect ancient styles once mastered by Seneca, Cicero, and Virgil. As often happens in history, however, this effort at revival had the exact opposite of its intended effect. The rejection of the Latin then in use in favor of a classical model had the effect not of reviving the classical world, but of ensuring that Latin became a dead language, since the forms enthusiastically recovered and imitated from the ancient pagans did not correspond with Renaissance life.q

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  The Genesis of Science

  How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution

  • James Hannam(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Regnery

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Humanism and the Reformation

  By the time Constantinople fell in 1453, the pope was back in Rome after his sojourn in Avignon and better still, there was only one of him. However, the popes of the late fifteenth century were among the worst in history. They battled for secular power in Italy while using the wealth of the Church to fund lavish parties and building projects. The Vatican was a den of vice and corruption. On the plus side, the profligacy of the papacy and the rest of the Italian nobility provided the funds necessary to produce the artistic jewels of quattrocento Italy as each city tried to outdo the others in flamboyance. The best painters, sculptors, and architects were held in high esteem, and the need to produce more and more remarkable art drove innovation. Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446) designed the spectacular dome that tops Florence’s cathedral and was the first to codify the technique of perspective.1 Painting was further improved when vegetable oil became the medium of choice for artists. Oil paints allowed for a greater depth of color than the earlier egg-based pigments. All these innovations resulted in art so dazzling that later generations dubbed the entire period the Renaissance.

  THE RISE OF HUMANISM

  As we have already seen, historians have a tendency to give valueladen names to historical periods. These help to fix popular perceptions of the period in question. And, if the name catches on, other historians co-opt it to their own periods. We have met two renaissances so far, the Carolingian renaissance under the Emperor Charlemagne and the resurgence of scholarship during the twelfth century. The period that everybody means by “the” Renaissance lasted roughly from the late fourteenth to the early sixteenth century. The French historian Jules Michelet (1798–1874) first coined the term in the 1850s, but it took Jacob Burckhardt (1818–1897) from Switzerland to turn it into common currency in his seminal work The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860).2 Michelet and Burckhardt both strongly contrasted the rebirth of culture in the fifteenth century with medieval stagnation. As Burckhardt claimed: “In the Middle Ages, both sides of the human consciousness lay dreaming or half awake beneath a common veil.”3

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  Renaissance Humanism, Volume 2

  Foundations, Forms, and Legacy

  • Albert Rabil, Jr.(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • University of Pennsylvania Press Anniversary Collection

    (Publisher)

  17** HUMANISM IN ENGLAND Richard J. Schoeck T HE CLASSICAL HERITAGE OF EUROPE, THOUGH NOT ALWAYS CON-tinuous in all parts of the Continent, is immensely broad and deep; and here and there it was—in the mind of an Augustine, a Bede, or a Dante—brought to a fresh synthesis and endowed with a new immediacy. A study of humanism (which is the ideal of classical educa-tion, learning, and imitation) must consequently consider the whole even while examining one of its phases separately, recognizing that medieval humanism grew out of the classical studia humanitatis and that the roots of Renaissance humanism lie deep in the fabric of medieval thought and letters. 1 From the time of the early church fathers and continuing through the Middle Ages, Britain possessed a tradition of learning that produced many scholars of great distinction, men like Aldhelm, Bede, and John of Salisbury. 2 Although the patristic and medieval approaches to learning were different from that of Petrarch (1304—1374), who brought a revival of learning to Italy which in more modern times has taken on the name of humanism, 3 those traditions also shared much common ground in their study of classical texts, and certain of the patristic and medieval traditions must be seen as continuing into the Renaissance period. For example, the thorny question of the relation between pagan learning and Christian piety haunted some of the church fathers and their successors. Tertullian had asked: What has Athens to do with Jerusalem? And the great Anglo-Saxon scholar Alcuin, in a letter of 797, addressed the ques-tion of what should be read at a corporate priestly meal, asking: What [has] Ingeld to do with Christ?—a questioning echoed by St. Bernard of Clairvaux in the early twelfth century, by Petrarch in the fourteenth, and by Erasmus in the sixteenth.

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  Intellectual Origins of the French Enlightenment

  • Ira O. Wade(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  But every act of exaltation carries within itself an act of denial. Under pretext of exalting the power of God, Calvin was willing to mutilate the nature of man. Much of his doctrine will reappear in that of the Jansenists, though in a new context, thanks to Pascal. Thus both the Reformation and the Counter-reformation ultimately led away from the powers of man in the interest of proclaiming again the powers of God. This tendency, to be sure, ran counter to the idea so prevalent in both the universities and among the humanists that knowledge—all knowledge—was a means of releasing man's inner powers. Thus, in the end, Calvinism tended, despite its incipient individualism, to negate man's personal religion and to curtail his liberties by stressing the unlimited power of God. In a way, it neither freed man to be himself, nor did it really enhance the glory of God. Rather it established a dilemma between freedom and grace and left the door open to the impression that any desire for intellectual freedom rendered man unworthy of God's grace. This paradox could be solved in only one of two ways: by granting larger powers to man or placing limits upon the absolute powers of the Deity. As in the case of all human paradoxes, both solutions were put into effect. •76 · 5. T H E RESPONSE OF RENAISSANCE MAN T HE IMPORTANT historical events in the Renaissance are the collapse of the Byzantine Empire; new inventions such as the compass and printing; the expansion of the geographical world, especially the discovery of America; the rise of the modern university with its emphasis upon science as equal in importance to morality, and philosophy as the equal of theology; the rise and de- velopment of a way of life called humanism; and a reconstruction in the field of religion called the Reformation. This phenomenologi- cal history leads to a structural history without which no epoch can achieve an inner personality of its own.

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  A History of German Literature

  From the Beginnings to the Present Day

  • Wolfgang Beutin, Klaus Ehlert, Wolfgang Emmerich, Helmut Hoffacker, Bernd Lutz, Volker Meid, Ralf Schnell, Peter Stein, Inge Stephan, Claire Krojzl(Authors)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Humanism and the Reformation

  O Jahrhundert, o Wissenschaften! (Oh Century! Oh Sciences!) Renaissance Humanism

  Ulrich von Hutten was one of the most outstanding German Humanists. A letter of his dated 25 October 1518 to the Nuremberg patrician Willibald Pirckheimer amounts to a summing-up of the contemporary situation. In it Hutten gives expression to the Humanist feeling for life, representing a whole generation in an age whose intellectual and artistic flowering could be seen as a decisive breakthrough and a departure from the Middle Ages: ‘O Jahrhundert, o Wissenschaften! Es ist eine Lust zu Leben, wenn auch noch nicht in der Stille. Die Studien blühen, die Geister regen sich. Barbarei, nimm dir einen Strick und mache dich auf Verbannung gefasst.’ (‘O century! O sciences! It is a delight to be alive, even if not yet in tranquillity. Study is burgeoning, the mental faculties are stirring. Barbarity, take a rope and prepare yourself for banishment.’)

  What Hutten could not know was that at the very moment he was singing the praises of his century Renaissance Humanism was already reaching its zenith, only a short while later to lose its resonance—in some cases rapidly, in others more gradually. The year 1527 saw the ‘Sacco di Roma’, the dreadful ravaging of Renaissance Rome by the mercenary army of the German emperor Karl V—an event that is customarily regarded as marking the end of the Renaissance.

  The Italian model

  The beginning of the Italian Renaissance is generally set in the thirteenth century, with the end of Hohenstaufen rule. This created a power vacuum in which the towns and a new urban culture could begin to develop. The first stirrings of Renaissance Humanism in Germany were discernible around 1400, and the first signs of the Humanist movement in the second half of the fifteenth century. Among the innovations evident prior to the shift towards the Renaissance in the empire, some of those concerning world-view and art in particular may be mentioned here.

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