Renaissance humanism

Back to the sources

The name comes from the studia humanitatis, the ‘humanities’: grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history and moral philosophy. In fourteenth-century Italy Petrarch (1304–1374) went back to the Roman classics and urged his readers to learn wisdom from the original texts and their eloquence, not from layers of commentary and the logic of the schools. Greek scholars from Byzantium taught their language in the West, and from the mid-fifteenth century the printing press multiplied books. The movement's watchword was ad fontes, ‘to the sources’.

Going back to the sources could cut deep. Lorenzo Valla (1407–1457) showed from its Latin that the Donation of Constantine, long used to support papal claims, was a much later forgery, and he wrote notes comparing the Latin Bible with the Greek. North of the Alps this learning joined with piety. Erasmus (c. 1466–1536) published the first Greek New Testament at Basel in 1516, with a new Latin translation Erasmus, Greek New Testament. Scholars began to test the familiar Latin Bible against the Greek. When Jesus began to preach, "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near" (Matthew 4:17), the Latin had often been taken to mean ‘do penance’; the Greek metanoeō (μετανοέω) speaks rather of a change of mind and life. It was a scholarly version of what the Bereans did:

Now the Bereans were more noble-minded than the Thessalonians, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if these teachings were true.

Acts 17:11

Humanism and the Reformation

Many Reformers were trained humanists: Philip Melanchthon, professor of Greek at Wittenberg; Huldrych Zwingli in Zurich; John Calvin, whose first book was a commentary on Seneca. They expounded Scripture with the humanists' tools of language and textual study, and they founded schools to teach the next generation. A saying went round at the time that Erasmus laid the egg and Luther hatched it. The Catholic Reformation drew on the same learning: in Spain, Cardinal Jiménez de Cisneros sponsored a great Polyglot Bible printing the original texts side by side.

Yet humanism was not the same as the Reformation. Erasmus satirised the church's corruption and the subtleties of scholasticism, but he hoped the church would be renewed through learning and a simple piety of following Christ, and he remained in the Catholic Church. In 1524 he argued that the human will keeps a small power to respond to grace; Luther answered the next year that, where salvation is concerned, the will is bound by sin and only God's grace can free it Luther, The Bondage of the Will (see free will). The road back to the sources was open; what one heard there was another question.

Whenever we study the Bible in its original languages, compare its oldest manuscripts, or read the Fathers in their own words, we draw on this movement. Learning saves no one, but the labour to hear God's word more exactly serves the church. The period is told in the lesson Late medieval crisis and the forerunners of reform.