The above examination, partial though it is, shows us the range of early
modern opinions about the role of the church fathers in the transmission
of non-Christian humanities. While Salutati thought that both Christian
and non-Christian thinkers transmitted the same truth, his contemporary
Leonardo Bruni, although apparently sharing Salutati’s view, went down in
history, thanks to his translation of Basil’sAd iuvenes, as diffusing Basil’s
commendation of pagan letters and their use in learning theology while
keeping the two distinct. Thomas Murner in the Northern Renaissance used
Augustine and to some extent Jerome, but not Basil, to show the importance
and relevance but also the limits of the study of humanities to a Christian
theologian. Reformers such as Bullinger and Melanchthon viewed the fathers
as a stepping stone between sacred and profane literature and viewed profane
literature as crucial to the smooth running of the Christian state according to
the right values, thus implicitly echoing Basil’s view that non-Christian hu-
manities helped us acquire virtue which was indispensable to learning things
sacred. Castellio, as we saw, constitutes the odd man out in what is otherwise a
fair degree of agreement among early modern scholars on the symbiotic
relationship between profane antiquities and the fathers, the latter serving in
various ways as a mediating voice for the former.
BASIL OF CAESAREA: EARLY MODERN
EDITIONS AND TRANSLATIONSI shall now take a brief look at some early modern editions and translations of
the theological works of Basil, to see whether any were motivated by pedagogical
and civic concerns. Finally, I shall say a few words about Clement of Alexandria
and his editors and translators, given that his works were especially valued as a
source of extracts and quotations from non-Christian earlier writers.
I shall focus my analysis on those editions or translations of Basil that were
thought to serve a primarily educational or civic purpose as opposed to the
vast majority that served an ecclesiological, theological, or polemical end.
Significantly enough, as regards Latin edition of Basil’s complete works, only
thefirst one of them, which dates from 1515 and which has as author Raphael
Maffei (1451–1522), papalscriptorand member of the confraternity of the
Holy Spirit at Sassia in Italy, has a clearly educational aim.^35 As he explains in
(^35) Raphael Maffei (ed.),Opera magni Basilii per Raphaelem Volaterranum nuper conversa...
(Rome: Jacob Mazochius, 1515). See Backus,Lectures,15–23 for further details of Maffei’s life
and career and for details of his edition. However, in theLecturesI do not touch on the issue of
the editors’/translators’attitude to the church fathers as an aid in the acquisition of pagan
learning or on the importance of the latter to Christians.
46 Irena Backus