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The scientific enquiry that gave rise to the humanism of the early Renaissance spurred revolutions in education, which until then tended to take intellectual authority from ecclesiastics and divorce scientific thinking from religious belief. During the

fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, theological dogma was not so readily accepted, and a spirit of scientific enquiry that grew increasingly hostile to religion developed. Fourteenth century Italian humanists saw classical civilisation as a golden age of creative genius. This century and the century that followed was a period of growing secularism and prosperity, due mainly to the expansion of trade; a time when educated Christians were more concerned with culture and literature than with philosophy proper, looking at the great men of antiquity for their models. Latin literature had been studied in the High Middle Ages, and Renaissance humanists added the study of classical Greek literature, which in the early fourteenth century was beginning to appear in Italy. These mostly well-to-do Christians edited, translated and commented implying at times that ethics was the more important for salvation. Hooker claimed that besides the supreme and eternal divine law, there is a second eternal law, which consists in the order of things in this universe. ‘Man’ comes to an understanding of this order from his natural experience and by the use of ordinary reasoning.

on the texts that came into their possession, while also writing on grammar, philology, ethics, and history, raising the standards of literary style and historical criticism. In the process, ‘they celebrated humanity.’177

Renaissance humanists tended to look at classical Greek and Roman antiquity as an intellectual and cultural high point, following the period of decline in the Dark Ages. In place of an increasingly arcane Scholastic concern with logic and science, and the deadening obsession to harmonise Christian theology, they read classical authors as a source not only of ideas but also of spiritual replenishment. In contrast to medieval thinkers, whose work was often performed in a spirit of humble submission to God, the humanists tended to see their own study of classical culture, the humanitas, as a way of celebrating human excellence and aesthetic beauty.

In this context, the discussion about the soul, the self and morality derived from natural or divine law, was to take another turn. In the midst of this humanistic

celebration however, ‘the good and right for man’ were still ultimately determined by reference to the law or will of God, for Renaissance thinking was not irreligious or atheistic. The difference was that even the more religious-minded ethicists at the dawn of modern philosophy, as Bourke rightly characterises the beginning of the Renaissance period, focussed their interest on the individual human person, his or her unlimited capacities, freedom, and opportunities not only for future salvation but for terrestrial accomplishment.178

The Platonic character of Italian and British humanism

In the thirteenth century, as we have seen, Aristotelianism dominated philosophy and theology in the universities, while Augustinianism survived among the clergy and in popular religious literature. But in the fourteenth century, a Byzantine tradition of Platonism, along with many previously untranslated works of Plato, arrived in Italy. Petrarch had read Plato only through Latin authors, such as Cicero and Augustine, in the latter of whom he seemed to identify ‘the passionate spiritual yearning of his own

177

Raymond Martin and John Barresi 2006, p.109, from a quote by Paul Oskar Kristeller, Renaissance Thought: The Classic, Scholastic and Humanistic Strains, Harper & Row, New York, 1961; Note 1, p.321

soul.’ Later in the Renaissance, Petrarch’s successors studied Plato in Greek, and during the first half of the fifteenth century, they translated many Platonic dialogues into Latin.179

Perhaps the most important Renaissance Platonist was Marsilio Ficino, the leader of the Florentine Platonic Academy. Like his friend and student, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Ficino was profoundly influenced not only by Petrarch but also by

Aristotelianism. Both Ficino and della Mirandola acknowledged their indebtedness to Aristotle and to medieval thinkers, without entering the polemics of earlier humanists. Ficino exalted love as the ideal standard of moral living, defining the love that binds all men in one species as children of God as humanitas.180 This ideal ‘humanity’ is thus understood as the source not only of the goodness and beauty in the life of the individual but it is also the standard of perfection in the arts and all human

endeavours. Like all followers of Plotinus, Ficino believed in friendship as an ideal spiritual relationship for people participating together in the contemplative life, understood as an ecstatic, experiential union with God. This theory of friendship appealed not only to members of his Platonic Academy but also to many others, and was celebrated repeatedly in prose and verse throughout the sixteenth century.181

Like Ficino, della Mirandola also sought to synthesise philosophical and spiritual thought, believing that humans do not occupy a fixed place in the universal hierarchy, but fashion their own destinies. His Oration was the most famous expression of the humanist ideals of human dignity and the freedom. For the Florentine Platonists, the concept of human dignity was universal, and not sectarian or personal. They

celebrated religious diversity, emphasising that religion is natural to humans and that all religious and philosophical traditions have their own true insights. The Church hierarchy, however, did not appreciate this ecumenicalism, and in 1513 promulgated as official Church dogma the personal immortality of the soul.182

179

Raymond Martin and John Barresi, 2006, pp.110-11

180

We owe to Ficino the term Platonic love, which he developed as an ideal of love and friendship, rooted in classical and Christian conceptions of spiritual fellowship, as well as in medieval conceptions of courtly love.

181

Raymond Martin and John Barresi, 2006, pp.112-13

182

All hope for ecumenical debate would soon end a few years later, when Martin Luther nailed his ninety-five propositions to the door of All Saints’ church in Wittenberg, with the result that for hundreds of years, religion would be the source of a bitter conflict throughout Europe. (Raymond Martin and John Barresi, 2006, pp.113-14)

Although there was a clear Platonic strand in most classical scholars during the Renaissance, this did not entirely erase Aristotelian thought, and we often find synthesised in their writings the main elements of both Platonic and Aristotelian theories. We thus find the Aristotelian tendency in Italy best represented by Pietro Pomponazzi. Believing that knowledge is acquired by reason rather than faith, he discovered in the new Latin translations a naturalistic Aristotle who denied personal immortality, but believed that the human soul could participate in the divine. The Aristotelian idea that the essential reward of moral virtue is virtue itself, and that this is what makes humans happy, was thus carried forward in his writings, although in Pomponazzi’s belief that right action contributes to the universal good, he also accommodates and extends the Platonists’ notion of human solidarity.

Most British classical scholars were influenced by the Platonic, rather than the

Aristotelian school of Italian humanism however, and a couple of examples will serve to illustrate the nature of this British school of thought.

One of the most unusual, and also one of the better known humanists in Renaissance England was Thomas More. His ethics has a broad Platonic inspiration that supports the view that man’s universal nature indicates the way of virtue to each person, arguing in his Utopia, obviously influenced by Plato’s Republic, that reason might develop certain principles of natural religion. The following passage conveys More’s understanding of natural virtue as he describes it in his Utopians:

They define virtue thus, that it is a living according to Nature, and think that we are made by God for that end; they believe that a man follows the dictates of Nature when he pursues or avoids things according to the direction of reason; they say that the first dictate of reason is the kindling in us a love and reverence for the Divine Majesty; to whom we owe both all that we have and all that we can hope for. In the next place, reason directs us to keep our minds as free from passions and as cheerful as we can, and that we should consider ourselves as bound by the ties of good-nature and humanity to use our utmost endeavours to help forward the happiness of all other persons…183

More then proceeds to describe what Bourke calls a ‘theory of psychological hedonism’, attenuated only by a reasonable concern for the welfare of society:

183

From Thomas More’s Utopia, trans. Ralph Robinson, Lupton, New York, 1890, p.65, in Vernon J. Bourke, 1968/2008, pp.219-20

And from thence they infer, that if a man ought to advance the welfare and comfort of the rest of mankind, there being no virtue more proper and peculiar to our nature than to ease the miseries of others, to free from trouble and anxiety in furnishing them with the comforts of life, in which pleasure consists, Nature much more vigorously leads him to do all this for himself. A life of pleasure is either a real evil, and in that case we ought not to assist others in their pursuit of it…or if it is a good thing, so that we not only may, but ought to help others to it, why then ought not a man to begin with himself? Since no man can be more bound to look after the good of another than after his own; for Nature cannot direct us to be good and kind to others, and yet at the same time to be unmerciful and cruel to ourselves. Thus, as they define virtues to be living according to Nature, so they imagine that Nature prompts all people on to seek after pleasure, as the end of all they do.184

While More’s Utopia is deliberately devoid of early Christian moralising, the outlook of Sir Thomas Elyot is more strictly in the classic tradition of Plato. Elyot translated della Mirandola’s The Rules of a Christian Life late in his life; though in his earlier work he had set the ethical foundation for the education of a political ruler that follows close upon the Greek doctrine of the great virtues. He quoted Aristotle

extensively, while he regarded Plato as ‘the most noble Philosopher’, which illustrates how these two influences were present in his thinking and that of other Renaissance humanists.185

Catholic Scholasticism and Aristotelian ethics

Also towards the latter part of the fifteenth and the early part of the sixteenth century, a quite different school of Aristotelian ethics is found in Catholic Scholasticism, whose activities were centred in Spain and Portugal, but extended somewhat into other countries in Europe. Typical of this movement was Francisco de Vitoria, a Dominican professor at the University of Salamanca, who made in his Commentary on the Second Part of the Summa Theologiae, a well-informed study of the moral teaching of Thomas Aquinas. More importantly, his treatise On the Law of War shows him as a practical thinker on problems of international relations. Examining Aquinas’ conditions for a country to be justified in going to war, Vitoria added his conviction that the good results of a war should exceed the evil consequences. As a consequence of views such as these, Vitoria is regarded as the founder of the theory of international

184

Ibid, pp.220-21

law, of which he was a staunch advocate.186

Besides the Dominican writers in the Iberian Peninsula, an outstanding group of Aristotelian Scholastics was found in the Society of Jesus. Almost from the

beginning, the Jesuits had as a textbook for philosophical studies the Opera Omnia of Aristotle. Their Spanish founder, Ignatius of Loyola had studied philosophy and theology at the University of Paris, where he developed a great respect for Aristotle. The Jesuit concept of the education of ‘the whole man’ owes a great deal to the ideals of classical humanism, and has been developed by many other distinguished Jesuits since.187

Francisco Suárez, a late sixteenth century Spanish Jesuit, was perhaps the most important and influential ethicist in the Renaissance however. A strong influence on both Catholic and Protestant moral thinkers well into the nineteenth century, and even until recently on British and American ethicists, Suárez called the Aristotelian

doctrine of the finality of human beings a metaphor, thus taking much of the force out of a teleological Aristotelian approach to ethical judgement. As for ‘human nature’, he held a contextual view of the individual person, which in his teachings meant that ‘man’ is viewed in all his essential relations. He also held that man’s reason is the power in which natural law is known; describing conscience in his later works as that judgement of practical understanding by which a person distinguishes between concrete good and evil and between what is commanded or prohibited. The rules that he provided for the solution of problems of conscience were influential into the seventeenth century and beyond.188

The denial of ‘free will’ in Reformation theology

In a radical turn in the history of moral philosophy, the established notion that ‘man’ is free to choose between good and evil, and that clear reasoning and judgement are essential characteristics of our ‘human nature’ - the basic tenets for attaining a harmonious existence in solidarity with all living beings handed down by Platonic 186 Ibid, pp.225-26 187 Ibid, p.227 188 _{Ibid, pp.228-34}

and Aristotelian understandings of human beings - would be met with one of the more forceful challenges at the dawn of the sixteenth century, in the teachings of the

Protestant Reformers.

Martin Luther and the early reformers were bitter in their attacks upon Scholasticism and the influence of Aristotle, ‘the damned heathen’, as he was called, although it seems that later Protestants were not averse to explaining their theology by scholastic methods.189 MacIntyre also remarks that Luther too, like Machiavelli, though each in different ways, marks ‘the break with the hierarchical, synthesising society of the Middle Ages, and the distinctive moves into the modern world.’190

Luther’s ethics can be best understood as a structure where the only true moral rules are the divine commandments, but these commandments have no further rationale or justification than that they are the injunctions of God. For Luther, there is a natural antagonism between what we want and what God commands us to do, and since human reason and will cannot obey divine commands, enslaved as it is by sin, we have to act against reason and against our natural will. We are, therefore, saved only by divine grace and not by our works. The importance of Luther for the history of moral theory lies in his upholding of the absolute rights of secular authority while demanding that we attend only to faith and not to works or actions that involve insurrection against lawful authority. His denial of ‘free will’ in ‘man’, at the

conclusions of his Bondage of the Will, written as a refutation of Erasmus’ Treatise on Free Choice, is a statement of the limitations under which human volition operates.191

The belief that we have to hope for grace that we may be justified and forgiven for our inability to obey divine command is equally strong in John Calvin. Convinced of the utter depravity of human beings, he drew up a strict and harsh code of human conduct, in which there is a view of moral law which is antithetic to the whole idea of natural law. In Calvin, as in Luther too, ‘a bifurcated view of morality’ as MacIntyre has called it, is discernable. On the one hand, there are the unquestionable but

arbitrary divine commandments; and on the other, there are the self-justifying rules of

189

Vernon J. Bourke 1968/2008, p.235, quoting Giorgio de Santillana; note 43., p.356

190

Alasdair MacIntyre, 1967/2006, p.117

the political and economic order. The individual is the subject of both realms, defined as against the God who creates him, and as against the political and economic order to which he or she is subordinated. Such an individual stands alone before God, and his or her new social identity is conferred by freedom of choice. In the experience of the Protestant individual there are thus no previously specified evaluative commitments other than those than can be derived from the individual’s own faith.192

Self-exploration as a way to self-knowledge

In the path of continental self-exploration that heralded Enlightenment thinkers, Michel de Montaigne is a representative figure, as he draws in his own thinking from both Epicurean and Christian sources to develop a process of acceptance of the transience of human existence that leads in turn to a position of self-knowledge. Montaigne was very much aware of the mutability and impermanence of all things, including human life, as his reflections on the problem that this brings for defining what ‘human nature’ consists of show:

There is no constant existence, neither of our being, nor of the objects. And we, and our judgement, and all mortal things else do uncessantly rowle, turne, and passe away… We have no communication with being; for every humane nature is ever in the middle between being borne and dying; giving nothing of itself but an obscure apparence and shadow, and an uncertaine and weak opinion. And if perhaps you fix your thought to take its being; it would be even, as if one should go about to grasp the water.193

As Montaigne saw perpetual change around him, he was moved to say that

‘Constancy it selfe is nothing but a languishing and wavering dance.’ This life will then reveal as much as any other, because ‘chaque homme porte la forme entiere de l’humaine condition’: ‘every man beareth the whole stampe of humane condition.’194

Montaigne’s self-examination arises in response to the terrifying inner instability that the awareness of the uncertainty that life is transient brings with it. In the process of realising the limits to human existence, Montaigne comes to a position of self-