For a number of reasons, scholastic humanism ultimately failed. The
scholastic ambition of synthesizing all available knowledge was self-defeating
because scholastic compilations of authoritative texts and commentaries
themselves contributed to the proliferation of knowledge and only showed
that reality is too complex to be unified by human understanding. Moreover,
the scholastic penchant for conducting science without experiments was also a
dead end. And so scholastic exegesis was soon replaced by Renaissance
humanism, and scholastic natural philosophy by empirical science. Nonethe-
less, we should not forget that scholastic humanists gave us the universities
and that their trust in reason laid the foundations for modern science,^57 and,
indeed, for the Enlightenment. The medievalist Edward Grant asserts that‘the
Middle Ages was itself an Age of Reason and marks the real beginnings of the
intense, self-conscious use of reason in the West’.^58
RENAISSANCE HUMANISMWhen we consider the next cultural period, we need to ignore Renaissance
humanists’own exaggerated sense that they were breaking with the‘dark ages’
(an expression coined by the humanist Petrarch), and we also have to ignore
the view held by many evangelicals and Reformed world view enthusiasts that
Renaissance humanism is secularism waiting to come out of the closet. Secular
humanists themselves, of course, share this view with Christian critics, but
celebrate rather than lament it. And yet faithfulness to the historical evidence
demands that we interpret the Renaissance as a basic continuation of patristic
and medieval Christian humanism.
It is true, of course, that Renaissance humanists emphasized the individual
more than did medieval theologians, and developed a stronger philological
and historical consciousness than preceding Christian thinkers. On the whole,
however, we have to view Renaissance humanism as a broadly Christian
movement in the tradition of the earlier Christian humanisms. Consider, for
instance, that Renaissance humanists brought about a patristic revival, retriev-
ing not only Aristotle and Plato, but also, and with great religious earnestness,
patristic sources, such as Augustine (in the case of Petrarch) or Origen,
Jerome, and Irenaeus (in the case of Erasmus). The apparently unorthodox
tendency to extol the greatness and god-like stature of humanity appears less
heretical when we understand it as a continuation of the patristic language of
deification. Hence, when Pico della Mirandola (1463–94) goes on about the
(^57) Southern,Scholastic Humanism, 43.
(^58) Edward Grant,God and Reason in the Middle Ages(Cambridge and New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2001), 291.
150 Jens Zimmermann