Bullinger, as I pointed out elsewhere, received his humanist training in the
context of the Northern Renaissance dominated by Erasmus. Although, as
noted already by Staedtke and others,^5 Bullinger did know something of the
Southern Renaissance and did praise south of the Alps scholars such as
Chrysoloras, Bessarion, and Gaza for their renewal of Greek studies while
Valla, Niccolo Perotti, Hermolao Barbaro, Angelo Politiano, and Philippe
Beroaldo renewed the study of Latin,^6 it was not to any of these men but to
Erasmus that he attributed the diffusion of the fathers as part of the human-
ities programme.
Of course, Erasmus was not an inventor of this approach. As several
scholars have pointed out, viewing church fathers as an intrinsic part of the
humanities was a characteristic of the Renaissance south of the Alps. While
Petrarch (1304–74) did not actually publish any patristic writings, he did make
Augustine a part of his own spirituality, as shown by several moral treatises,
such as theDe contemptu mundi, which consists of three dialogues between
the author and St Augustine, both of them in the presence of Truth. Moreover,
Coluccio Salutati (1331–1406), the chancellor of Florence and keyfigure of the
Florentine cultural Renaissance, although no theologian, followed Petrarch’s
example and used especially Augustine as part of his sacred rather than
ecclesiastical studies, so that studying the fathers became linked in some
humanist minds with liberation from scholastic theology, just as reading
classical authors such as Cicero or Virgil was inseparable from freeing the
Latin language from scholastic corruptions and accretions. We might note
here that both Petrarch and Salutati modelled their approach on Augustine
himself, who according to Salutati’s letter of 1335 to Giacomo di Colonna was
directed by providence to read Cicero’sHortensiusand so‘tofly to greater
heights’(volare altius) towards the‘study of truth alone’(ad solius veritatis
studium).^7 Salutati for his part considered all study of truth to be a part of the
study of God, or, as he put it in a letter to the Camaldolese monk Giovanni da
San Miniato:
This one and only God is not just the truth, as I once wrote to you, but the entire
truth all true and infinite and natural, that is the basis, the seed, and the origin of
all truths, not just preceding any truth, that is, but he in some manner is all things
that manifest and declare the truth, that is the uprightness of the mind, the innate
principle that directs to the good and away from the bad, the correspondence of(^5) Irena Backus,‘Bullinger and Humanism’, in Emidio Campi and Peter Opitz (eds),Heinrich
Bullinger: Life—Thought—Influence(Zurich: tvz, 2007), 645–6.
(^6) Staedtke,Die Theologie, 31.
(^7) See Paul Oskar Kristeller,‘Augustine and the Early Renaissance’, in Paul Oskar Kristeller
(ed.),Studies in Renaissance Thought and Letters, vol. 1 (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura,
1956), 362–3; Francisco Bernardo Gianni,‘Colluccio Salutati e“eredita agostiniana”’, in Maria
Rosa Cortesi and Claudio Leonardi (eds),Tradizioni patristiche nell’umanesimo(Florence:
Sismel, 2000), 43–80, esp. 45–7.
The Church Fathers and the Humanities 35