6
Erasmus, Christian Humanism,
and Spiritual Warfare
Darren M. Provost
Early Italian humanists such as Petrarch, Leonardo Bruni, and Collucio
Salutati believed that the best way of understanding and recovering what it
meant to be truly human was to study the cultural products humans created.
And so humanists in the Renaissance had a special dedication to what they
referred to as thestudia humanitatis, which we today call the humanities or
the liberal arts. Renaissance humanists sought to replace the medieval scho-
lastic method, which emphasized logic and metaphysics, with an educational
programme that emphasized the study of language, literature, rhetoric, his-
tory, and ethics.
The Renaissance humanists were particularly concerned with reviving the
study of ancient Greek and Roman language, literature, and history, because
they shared with the ancient Greeks and Romans the belief that the object of
education was moulding an individual’s character so that it more closely
approximated an ideal—education as character formation.^1 For example,
Plato described true education as a conversion from the world of sensual
self-deception to the world of true being, the absolute good beyond being,
something Plato called god. In theRepublicandTheaetetus, virtue is described
as becoming god-like.^2(^1) Werner Jaeger,Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, vol. 1:Archaic Greece: The Mind of
Athens, trans. Gilbert Highet, 2nd edn (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), xxii. My
following description of the development of theocentric humanism from the Greeks, Romans,
and patristic anthropology to medieval Christianity is heavily indebted to the scholarship of Jens
Zimmermann, who graciously shared with me in manuscript form hisHumanism and Religion:
A Call for the Renewal of Western Culture(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
(^2) A good man is described as one who is‘willing to put his heart into becoming just and
pursuing virtue to the extent of becoming like a god as much as is possible for a human being’.
Plato,Republic10: 613b. Socrates similarly argues inTheaetetusthat, since evil has no place in
the divine world,‘we should make all speed toflee from this world to the other, and that means
becoming like the divine so far as we can’, Plato,Theaetetus176b.