mysteries, and so Scripture is the crucial source of knowledge to all believers.
However, those who are too young to understand the depths of the Holy Spirit
can rely on other writings not altogether dissimilar from Scripture, rather like
shadows of it. Just as athletes, notes Basil, prepare for their competitions by
practising and exercising, so must we practise for the greatest of all competi-
tions, in so far as we can, by reading poetry, historical writings, and speeches.
And just as painters prepare their paints so that they hold their colour, so we
prepare ourselvesfirst with pagan teachings before turning to the properly
Christian doctrines. At the same time, in chapter 4 of his treatise, he counsels
strongly against reading pagan writers who are lewd, disrespectful of divinities,
and scornful in general. Only those writers are of use to the Christian whose
values are similar to Christian values. The ultimate end of Christian life, as
Basil points out in chapter 5, can only be obtained by virtue, and so the soul
must get used to practising it from childhood onwards. This, according to
Basil, was also the view of pagan writers such as Hesiod, Homer, and Solon.
Best of all are writers who teach us about virtuous deeds and who recount
those of men such as Pericles, Socrates, Alexander the Great, and the Pythag-
oreans, to mention only a few. Practising virtue in the Cappadocian’s view
amounts to getting the soul to master and rule the body, as he stresses in
chapter 9.^13
Such was the popularity of Bruni’s version, which went, once printed,
through about one hundred printings all over Europe between 1470 and
1560, that Basil’s view of pagan learning transmitted itself albeit with nuances
to most humanistically inclined theologians and thinkers north and south
of the Alps. Indeed, already the seventh printing of it, dating from 1474,
appeared in Nürnberg from the presses of Regiomontanus.^14 Its influence is
detectable, as we have seen in Bullinger’s work on the relevance of pagan
letters, but also in the works of anti-Reformation-minded humanists.
It is interesting to compare this view not just with Bullinger’s but with that
of a typical Catholic Northern Renaissance humanist. Our example is Thomas
Murner (1475–1537),^15 the conventual Franciscan friar (from 1490), lawyer,
(^13) For full text and French translation seeAux jeunes gens sur la manière de tirer profit des
lettres helléniques, trans. Ferdinand Boulenger (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1935); for English
translation see Roy J. Deferrari, LCL, Basil Letters 4 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1934; repr. 1961).
(^14) See Schucan,Nachleben, 244–7.
(^15) On Murner see esp. Erwin Iserloh,‘Thomas Murner’, in E. Iserloh (ed.),Katholishe
Theologen der Reformationszeit, vol. 2 (Münster: Aschendorff, 1986), 19–31. Cf. also
J. M. Miskuly,Thomas Murner and the Eucharist, 1520– 29 (St Bonaventure, NY: The Franciscan
Institute, 1990). For partial information on theReformatioin particular see Irena Backus,
‘Augustine and Jerome in Thomas Murner’sReformatioof 1509’, in L. Grane, A. Schindler,
M. Wriedt (eds),Auctoritas partumvol. 2 (Mainz: von Zabern, 1998), 14–26. See also Irena
Backus,‘Thomas Murner’, in Karla Pollmann et al. (eds),Oxford Guide to the Historical
Reception of Augustine(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
The Church Fathers and the Humanities 37