movement arose, in good measure, in reaction to scholasticism. Scholasti-
cism had become identified in the minds of many with insularity of voca-
bulary and a‘logic chopping’style of argument, and was widely felt to be
irrelevant to the concerns of the public in general. The humanists never
tired of polemicizing against the scholastics and mocking them, as does
Erasmus inThe Praise of Follywhen he notes that‘you’dextricateyour-
self faster from a labyrinth than from the torturous obscurities’of the
scholastics.^2 What did the humanists propose instead? At the centre of
their programme was the study of the pre-scholastic texts, the texts of
the ancient Greeks and Romans, and the texts of the church fathers.
Humanists studied all these texts, but especially the texts of the orators,
the poets, the dramatists, the historians, skipping over the layers and layers
of scholastic commentary that had accumulated over the centuries and going
straight back to the ancient texts.Ad fontesbecame the slogan, back‘to the
source’.
The scholastics had also engaged the texts from antiquity, not just prior
scholastic texts. As anyone who has read Aquinas knows full well, Aquinas
never stakes out a position of his own on a topic withoutfirst engaging the
thought of others who had written on the topic, Aristotle above all. But
humanists did not merely ignore scholastic texts and engage texts from
antiquity that the scholastics had neglected; they read texts in a new way.
As one reads along in Aquinas, the realization slowly dawns on one that
Aquinas views the philosophical and theological texts bequeathed to him as
a vast repository of wisdom. But the texts did not wear on their face the
wisdom they embodied; the embodied wisdom had to be extracted by
establishing priorities among the texts, making distinctions, pursuing impli-
cations, and so forth. That done, Aquinas was then in a position to make his
own contribution to this unified body of wisdom. Rarely does Aquinas say
that heflat out disagrees with what is said in some received text. Instead,
he almost always says,‘let us distinguish’. There were heretical texts. But
these never entered the discussion; they were excluded from the beginning.
The scholastics in general read the received texts as Aquinas did, namely, so
as to extract from them the unified body of wisdom that they supposedly
contained.
The humanists began to read the texts as we read now them, not in order
to extract from them some unified body of wisdom but tofind out what the
authors said. Our way of reading texts is the humanist way of reading texts.
The humanists made no attempt to harmonize the texts. Instead, they
happily accepted disagreements, as do we. In fact we relish the disagreements
(^2) Desiderius Erasmus,The Praise of Folly, ed. A. H. T. Levi, trans. Betty Radice (New York:
Penguin Classics, 1993), 88.
78 Nicholas Wolterstorff