Renaissance Philosophy

Renaissance philosophy is the thought of Europe from roughly the middle of the fourteenth century to the end of the sixteenth, the age of the Renaissance. It began in the city-states of northern and central Italy, above all Florence, and spread north across the Alps to France, the Low Countries, England, the German lands of the Holy Roman Empire and Poland. Its defining movement was humanism, a programme of education built on the close reading of classical Latin and Greek texts. Around it grew a remarkable variety of positions: a revived Platonism, new readings of Aristotle, frank political realism, Christian reform, scepticism and bold new pictures of the cosmos.

The period has no single great system to match those of Aquinas before it or Descartes after it, and historians long treated it as an interlude. That view has faded. The Renaissance recovered most of the ancient philosophical literature that survives today, printed it, translated it and argued over it. It placed the dignity and freedom of the individual at the centre of debate, separated the study of politics from moral instruction, shook confidence in Aristotle's physics and sharpened the doubts that the founders of early modern philosophy set out to answer.

Italy in the fourteenth century was not a nation but a patchwork. The merchant republics of Florence and Venice, the duchy of Milan, the kingdom of Naples and the Papal States around Rome competed for territory, trade and prestige. Their wealthy citizens needed secretaries, diplomats and lawyers who could write persuasive Latin. Italian universities, notably Padua and Bologna, were strong in medicine and natural philosophy rather than theology, which left room for a more secular style of inquiry.

The Black Death of 1347 to 1351 killed perhaps a third or more of the population and left survivors with a sharp sense of mortality and change. The medieval scholastic tradition described in Medieval Christian Philosophy carried on in the universities throughout this period, and many Renaissance thinkers were trained in it. What changed was less the content of the curriculum than the attitude towards the past: a new conviction that the ancient world had been a golden age of eloquence and wisdom, and that its texts should be read in their original form, without the accumulated layers of medieval commentary.

The usual starting point is Francesco Petrarca, known in English as Petrarch (1304 to 1374), a Tuscan poet who spent much of his life at the papal court in Avignon and in northern Italian cities. Petrarch hunted through monastery libraries for lost classical works, and in 1345 he found Cicero's letters to his friend Atticus in Verona. He mocked the scholastic philosophers of his day for their technical jargon and their reliance on Aristotle as filtered through Averroes, and he argued that philosophy should make people better rather than merely more clever. His model was the moral writing of Cicero, Seneca and Augustine, whose Confessions he carried with him.

Petrarch's followers developed the studia humanitatis, the humanities: grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history and moral philosophy, taught from classical authors. The word humanist began as student slang for a teacher of them. Coluccio Salutati, chancellor of Florence from 1375, and his successor Leonardo Bruni turned these skills into civic ideology, praising the Florentine republic as heir to republican Rome and defending the active life of the citizen against the older ideal of monastic withdrawal. Bruni also produced fresh Latin translations of Aristotle's Ethics and Politics, written in elegant classical style rather than the word-for-word Latin of the medieval translators.

Humanists developed critical tools for handling texts. Lorenzo Valla (c. 1407 to 1457), working at the court of Naples, showed in 1440 that the Donation of Constantine, a document in which the emperor Constantine supposedly gave the pope authority over the western empire, used Latin words and titles unknown in the fourth century and must be a later forgery. His method, judging a text by its language and history, became a lasting weapon of scholarship.

Medieval western scholars had read Aristotle in Latin, often through Arabic intermediaries, as described in Islamic and Jewish Philosophy, but few could read Greek, and most of Plato was unknown. That changed through contacts with the Byzantine Empire. In 1397 Manuel Chrysoloras, a diplomat from Constantinople, began teaching Greek in Florence at Salutati's invitation, and a generation of Italian scholars learned the language from him and his pupils.

The Council of Ferrara and Florence of 1438 to 1439, called to reunite the Latin and Greek churches against the Ottoman threat, brought hundreds of Byzantine churchmen to Italy. Among them was the elderly philosopher Georgios Gemistos, called Plethon, who lectured Florentines on the superiority of Plato to Aristotle and is said to have inspired Cosimo de' Medici to found a centre for Platonic study. Another delegate, Cardinal Bessarion, stayed in Italy, defended Plato in a famous controversy, and left his great library of Greek manuscripts to Venice.

The fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Empire in 1453 is often said to have started this movement of scholars and books westward. In fact the flow was well under way before 1453, but the fall gave it urgency, and refugees and manuscripts continued to arrive. Meanwhile humanist book-hunters were finding Latin texts in northern monasteries. In 1417 Poggio Bracciolini found Lucretius's poem On the Nature of Things, the fullest statement of Epicurean atomism, and the works of Sextus Empiricus, the main source for ancient scepticism, began to circulate. The philosophies of the Hellenistic and Roman schools, Stoic, Epicurean and Sceptic, re-entered European debate.

The printing press, developed by Johannes Gutenberg in Mainz around 1450, multiplied the impact. By 1500 presses in Venice, notably that of Aldus Manutius, were issuing Greek texts of Aristotle, Plato and others in large editions. A text recovered in one city could now be read across Europe within a few years.

Marsilio Ficino (1433 to 1499), the son of a physician to Cosimo de' Medici, became the central figure of Florentine Platonism. Cosimo gave him a villa at Careggi and Greek manuscripts, and Ficino translated the whole of Plato into Latin, printed in 1484, followed by Plotinus and other Neoplatonists. The so-called Platonic Academy around him was probably less a formal institution than a circle of friends, pupils and correspondents, and historians disagree about how organised it was.

Ficino's own philosophy, set out in his Platonic Theology, aimed to show that Platonism and Christianity agreed. He believed in an ancient theology, a single wisdom handed down from figures such as Hermes Trismegistus and Zoroaster through Pythagoras to Plato; the Hermetic writings he translated were in fact composed in late antiquity, as the scholar Isaac Casaubon showed in 1614. Ficino pictured reality as a ladder running from God through angels and souls down to bodies, with the human soul in the middle, linking the material and spiritual worlds. Much of his work was devoted to proving that the soul is immortal. He also gave Europe the idea of Platonic love, a love for another person that leads the soul upwards towards the love of God, and his writings on medicine and astrology were widely read.

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463 to 1494), a young nobleman of startling learning, went further in seeking harmony between traditions. In 1486 he published 900 theses drawn from Latin, Arabic, Greek and Hebrew sources, including the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah, and proposed to defend them all in a public debate in Rome. Pope Innocent VIII suspended the debate and a papal commission condemned thirteen of the theses; Pico fled to France, was briefly arrested and eventually returned to Florence under the protection of Lorenzo de' Medici. The speech he wrote to open the debate, later called the Oration on the Dignity of Man, has God tell Adam that, unlike other creatures, he has no fixed place in the world and may shape himself into whatever he chooses, sinking to the level of beasts or rising to the angels. Modern readers often treat this as a manifesto of Renaissance individualism, though for Pico the point was largely religious and mystical.

The Renaissance did not abandon Aristotle. More commentaries on his works were written in the sixteenth century than in the whole medieval period, and he remained the basis of university teaching everywhere. Humanists produced new translations from the Greek, and editors printed the ancient Greek commentators, such as Alexander of Aphrodisias, which offered alternatives to the readings of Averroes and Thomas Aquinas.

The sharpest of these Aristotelians was Pietro Pomponazzi (1462 to 1525) of Mantua, who taught at Padua and Bologna. His treatise On the Immortality of the Soul (1516) asked what Aristotle's principles, taken by themselves, imply about the human soul. Every act of human thought, he argued, depends on images supplied by the senses, and so on the body. There is no activity of the mind that is independent of the body, and therefore no natural reason to believe the soul survives death. Pomponazzi said he accepted immortality as an article of faith, but that philosophy could not prove it. He added that virtue is its own reward and does not need the promise of heaven. The book was burned in Venice and provoked many replies, though Pomponazzi kept his post. In a later work he explained apparent miracles and the effects of magic as the result of hidden natural causes. Padua remained a centre of this naturalistic Aristotelianism into the seventeenth century, and its debates over method influenced Galileo Galilei, who taught there from 1592 to 1610.

Niccolò Machiavelli (1469 to 1527) served the restored Florentine republic as a secretary and diplomat from 1498 to 1512, dealing with the kings of France, the papacy and the ruthless general Cesare Borgia. When the Medici returned to power in 1512 he was dismissed, briefly imprisoned and tortured, and retired to his farm near San Casciano. There, in 1513, he wrote The Prince, which circulated in manuscript and was printed only in 1532, after his death.

Earlier advice books for rulers described the ideal Christian prince. Machiavelli instead described how rulers actually gain and keep power. A prince who tries to be good in all things among so many who are not will come to ruin, he wrote, so he must learn when not to be good. It is safer to be feared than loved, if one cannot be both, though a wise prince avoids being hated. Success depends on virtù, an untranslatable mix of skill, boldness and energy, set against fortuna, the chance events that no one controls. His longer Discourses on Livy show that his real sympathies were republican: he praised the Roman Republic, argued that conflict between nobles and people could keep a state free, and urged citizen armies over mercenaries.

Whether Machiavelli was a teacher of evil, a patriot longing for an Italy freed from foreign armies, or a cool analyst separating politics from morality is still debated. His name quickly became a byword for cunning, and the Catholic Church placed his works on its Index of Prohibited Books in 1559. Yet his insistence on studying politics as it is, not as it should be, made him a founder of modern political thought. Later thinkers such as Jean Bodin in France, whose Six Books of the Commonwealth (1576) set out a theory of absolute sovereignty, wrestled with the questions he raised.

Humanism crossed the Alps in the later fifteenth century and took on a more religious character. Erasmus of Rotterdam (c. 1466 to 1536), born in the Netherlands and educated by the Brethren of the Common Life, became the most famous scholar in Europe, living at different times in Paris, England, Italy, Leuven and Basel. He called his programme the philosophy of Christ: a simple, inward piety based on the Gospels and the early Church Fathers, rather than on ceremonies, relics or scholastic subtleties. In 1516 he published the first printed Greek New Testament, with a new Latin translation that corrected the medieval Vulgate. His satire The Praise of Folly (1511), spoken by Folly herself, mocked theologians, monks, princes and popes, and ended by praising the holy folly of Christian faith. He opposed war between Christian rulers and wrote a guide to education for the future emperor Charles V.

His close friend Thomas More (1478 to 1535), a London lawyer, wrote Utopia (1516), whose title is a Greek pun meaning both no place and good place. In the first book, characters debate whether a wise man should serve a king and condemn the hanging of thieves made desperate by poverty. In the second, the traveller Raphael Hythloday describes an island where property is held in common, everyone works six hours a day, and many religions are tolerated. Readers still disagree about how far More endorsed this society and how far he was joking. More himself rose to become Lord Chancellor under Henry VIII, persecuted Protestants, and was beheaded in 1535 for refusing to accept the king as head of the English church.

Humanist calls for a return to the sources fed directly into the Protestant Reformation. In 1517 Martin Luther, a monk and professor at Wittenberg in Saxony, attacked the sale of indulgences, and within a few years his teaching had divided the Western church. Luther argued that people are saved by faith alone, through God's grace, and not by any good works of their own, and that scripture, not the papacy or church councils, was the final authority. He called Aristotle's Ethics the worst enemy of grace and wanted it removed from the training of theologians.

The clash between humanism and the Reformation came into the open in a debate on free will. In 1524 Erasmus wrote that human beings have some power to accept or reject God's grace; Luther replied in The Bondage of the Will (1525) that the will is enslaved to sin and that salvation rests entirely on God. John Calvin, a French humanist who led the reformed church in Geneva in Switzerland, set out a systematic theology in his Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536), emphasising God's sovereignty and predestination.

The Reformation's broader effects on thought were large but indirect. Disputes over which church held the truth raised the question of how anyone could know religious truth at all. Wars of religion, in France from 1562 and later in the Empire, forced thinkers to consider whether people of different faiths could live under one state. And the Catholic Council of Trent (1545 to 1563) reaffirmed scholastic theology, so that a revived scholasticism flourished in Spain and Portugal, where thinkers at Salamanca such as Francisco de Vitoria debated the rights of the peoples conquered by the Spanish Empire in the Americas.

The rediscovery of ancient scepticism had its greatest effect in France. Sextus Empiricus's Outlines of Pyrrhonism was printed in Latin in 1562, setting out arguments that for every claim an equally strong opposing claim can be found, so the wise person suspends judgement. Reports from the Age of Discovery of peoples with utterly different customs added to the sense that much of what Europeans took for natural was merely habit.

Michel de Montaigne (1533 to 1592), a nobleman and former magistrate of Bordeaux, retired to his family estate in 1571 and began to write short pieces he called essais, attempts or trials. The first two books appeared in 1580 and the expanded edition of three books in 1588. Montaigne wrote about friendship, cruelty, education, idleness, his kidney stones and the experience of falling from a horse, testing his judgement on whatever came to hand, with the aim of knowing himself. His motto was a question, Que sais-je?, what do I know?

His longest essay, the Apology for Raymond Sebond, is a sustained sceptical attack on human pride in reason. The senses deceive, opinions vary with time and place, and animals may be wiser than we suppose. In Of Cannibals he described the peoples of Brazil and suggested that Europeans, who tortured and burned one another over religion, had little right to call them barbarians. Montaigne drew a conservative conclusion from his doubts: since reason cannot settle religious disputes, it is wiser to accept the faith and laws of one's country. His friend Pierre Charron systematised these ideas, and the Portuguese-born physician Francisco Sanches published That Nothing Is Known in 1581. Montaigne's influence was immense; William Shakespeare drew on the English translation of 1603, and Descartes and Pascal both wrote with the Essays in mind.

Alongside these developments, a group of mostly Italian thinkers tried to replace Aristotle's account of nature altogether. Nicholas of Cusa, a German cardinal of the fifteenth century, had already argued that the universe has no fixed centre and that human knowledge is a learned ignorance that approaches truth without ever grasping it. In the sixteenth century Bernardino Telesio explained nature through the forces of heat and cold, and Tommaso Campanella, who spent decades in Neapolitan prisons, described an ideal society in The City of the Sun. Many of these thinkers, like Ficino, took magic, astrology and the hidden sympathies between things seriously, and the line between natural magic and natural science was not yet drawn.

The decisive challenge came from astronomy. Nicolaus Copernicus (1473 to 1543), a canon of Frombork in Royal Prussia who had studied at Kraków and in Italy, proposed that the Earth and other planets travel around the Sun. His On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres appeared in 1543, the year of his death, with an unsigned preface by another hand presenting the theory as a mere calculating device. For decades few accepted it as a physical truth, since it contradicted both scripture as then read and Aristotle's physics, in which heavy bodies fall towards the centre of the universe because that is their natural place.

Giordano Bruno (1548 to 1600), a Dominican friar from near Naples who fled his order, took Copernicus much further. Travelling through Geneva, Paris, London, Wittenberg and Prague, he taught that the universe is infinite, filled with countless suns and inhabited worlds, and animated throughout by a single world soul, with God present in all things. He also doubted central Christian doctrines. Lured back to Venice in 1591, he was handed to the Roman Inquisition, held for seven years, and burned in Rome on 17 February 1600. The exact charges are partly unknown, since the full trial record is lost, but they seem to have concerned theology more than astronomy.

Johannes Kepler, working in Prague, showed in 1609 that the planets move in ellipses, and Galileo (1564 to 1642), then a professor at Padua, turned a telescope on the sky. In The Starry Messenger (1610) he reported mountains on the Moon, countless stars invisible to the naked eye and four moons orbiting Jupiter. These discoveries made Aristotle's perfect and unchanging heavens hard to defend. Galileo argued that the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics, and his study of motion laid the foundations of a new physics. His later conflict with the Church, ending in his condemnation in 1633, belongs to the next chapter of the story.

By around 1600 the intellectual landscape had changed beyond recognition. Europeans could read almost the whole of ancient philosophy in print, in the original languages and in translation. The unity of the Western church had been broken, and religious authority was contested. Aristotle's physics was under attack from astronomy, and sceptical arguments had been revived with real force. Out of this situation came the Scientific Revolution and the attempts of the seventeenth century, by Francis Bacon, René Descartes and others, to rebuild knowledge on new and certain foundations.

The Renaissance thinkers also left more lasting legacies of their own. Humanist philology created the methods of modern textual scholarship and history. Pico's praise of human freedom, Machiavelli's realism, More's imagined commonwealth, Erasmus's plea for peace and toleration and Montaigne's candid self-examination each opened lines of thought that ran on through early modern philosophy and The Enlightenment. For the wider sequence of eras, see The History of Philosophy.