these characteristic features, I will brieflyreflect on what Christian humanism
might mean for us today, given our earlier sketch of Renaissance poets.
In examining syncretism, imitation, and collaboration, I hope to make
a persuasive argument that some of the great poetic achievements of the
English Renaissance were highly indebted and sometimes were responding
to and further developing the typical humanist training in values and tastes
that most of the Renaissance poets received in tutoring, at their grammar
schools, and universities.
SYNCRETISMThe extent of Christian humanist scholars’and poets’faithful outlooks has
often been simplified, if not overlooked altogether, as has the degree to which
their faith was integrated in their scholarly studies, usually focused on the
Greek and Roman classics by approaches philological, moral, philosophical,
political, archaeological, and so on. Some have held that the energy and
enthusiasm these scholars felt towards the classical subjects must have some-
how negated or compromised a true Christian belief and devotion. Being
intellectually formed by pagan authors and trained to express pagan values
certainly could complicate one’s Christian outlook or formation during the
Renaissance. For example, David Riggs draws attention to the ambivalent
effects of classical studies on the playwright Christopher Marlowe. Riggs
notes that Cambridge University and its curriculum‘taught Marlowe what
transgression was’, and Riggs continues to say that‘Marlowe embraced the
skeptical and libertine ideas that lay embedded in his classical education, lead-
ing in his plays to treatments of atheism and sodomy’.^1
On the other hand, others who have ignored the deep Christian expressive-
ness of Renaissance humanism have bypassed this attention to paganism,
instead seeing the humanistic movement as the birth of the secular, as the
first iteration of secularism or at least a liberal humanism.^2 The traction of this
evolutionary or teleological understanding of intellectual history is under-
standably attractive, but we cannot let it be irresistible, in fact we must resist
temptations to simplifications in any direction. A careful historical analysis
should equally eschew the proto-secularist reading of Renaissance humanists
and the over-Christianization of our authors that makes light of our human
classical inspirations and denies the complexities and, indeed, revolutions of
thought marking the Renaissance. For example, it will not do to underplay the
devotion Renaissance humanism truly felt towards the pagan classics; they
loved these ancient authors, and as I know from my own experience, when
(^1) David Riggs,The World of Christopher Marlowe(London: Faber & Faber, 2004), 72–7.
(^2) For a discussion of this tendency, see Jens Zimmermann,Humanism and Religion: A Call for
the Renewal of Western Culture(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 96.
174 Brett Foster