work of the early church fathers. To cite just one further example, Athana-
sius in his workOn the Incarnationwrote:‘Therefore he [i.e. God] assumed
a human body, in order that in it death might once for all be destroyed, and
that men might be renewed according to the Image [of God].’^11 Irenaeus’s
claim that the incarnation’s purpose was the assimilation of humanity to
character of God the Father illustrates a key premise at the heart of patristic
theology: that through Christ theimago Deiin human beings is healed
and humans are thus returned to the noble heights for which they were
originally created.^12
Scholastic humanists in the Middle Ages continued to pursue the ideal of
restoring humans to theimago Deiby seeking to repair the fragmentation of
knowledge supposedly occasioned by humanity’s fall from divine grace. As
R. W. Southern notes, scholastics aimed at‘restoring to fallen mankind, so far
as was possible, that perfect system of knowledge which had been in the
possession or within the reach of mankind at the moment of Creation’.^13
Scholastic humanism inherited, in the doctrines of creation and the incarna-
tion, the patristic theological premise for the pursuit of human knowledge
towards the improvement of humanity. The Judeo-Christian doctrine of
creation laid the foundation for the inherent dignity of both the natural
world and human nature, and from itflows the assumption that nature is
inherently intelligible and the universe is rational. The Christian doctrine of
the incarnation affirms creation, but beyond that claims the possibility of
amity between the human and the divine. Based on this incarnational the-
ology, medieval humanism carried forward the patristic interest in self-
knowledge by viewing the desire for the exploration of human nature as a
reflection of theimago Dei. The‘image of God’, wrote Thomas Aquinas,‘is
found in the soul according as the soul turns to God’.^14 The notion of an
educational programme that had as its telos the deification of the individual
continued with Renaissance humanists, even though they described it in
slightly different terms.
While Renaissance humanists self-consciously sought to differentiate them-
selves from their medieval predecessors, the majority of them, including
Erasmus, shared in the same basic Christian world view and agreed that
theosisrepresented the ultimate goal of education. Contrary to the common
misperception that the Renaissance marked the beginning of secularism, most
(^11) Athanasius,On the Incarnation3.13. This theme can be found consistently throughout
patristic writings. See M. C. Steenberg,Of God and Man: Theology as Anthropology from Irenaeus
to Athanasius(London: T & T Clark, 2009), 8.
(^12) See Zimmermann,Humanism and Religion, 69.
(^13) R. W. Southern,Scholastic Humanism and the Unification of Europe, vol. 1 (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1995), 5. See Zimmermann,Humanism and Religion,8–104.
(^14) Thomas Aquinas,Summa Theologicaq 93 art. 9; ed. Thomas Gilby, trans. Jordan Aumann
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 500.
Erasmus, Christian Humanism, and Spiritual Warfare 121