because they forestall boredom. In his book about Calvin, the historian
William Bouwsma well summarizes the humanist way of reading texts:
A major novelty of humanistic reading, based on seeing classical authors as
human beings rather than vehicles of transcendent wisdom, was insistence that
an interpreter of a text faithfully respect its author’s intention.‘Since it is almost
[the expositor’s] only task to unfold the mind of the writer whom he has
undertaken to expound,’Calvin wrote,‘he misses his mark, or at least strays
outside his limits insofar as he leads his readers away from the meaning of the
author.’Of a work of Augustine, one of his favorite authors, he remarked,‘If I am
twisting it into another meaning than Augustine’s, let them not only rail at me as
usual but spit in my face.’^3This new style of hermeneutics led the humanists into close study of the three
major ancient languages: Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. They set about trying to
find accurate copies of the ancient texts. They edited the ancient texts. They
wrote philologically based commentaries on the texts. They set the texts within
their historical contexts, insofar as they knew those contexts.
By no means were the humanists antiquarians, however. We all know about
the philosophers of ancient Greece. Somewhat fewer of us know about an
educational movement in ancient Greece whose members offered instruction
to students on how to give effective public speeches. In Plato’s dialogues, the
philosophers and these rhetoricians are presented in strident conflict with each
other. The picture one gets is that whereas philosophers aim at truth, teachers of
rhetoric aim at teaching their students how to persuade. They happily sacrifice
truth to persuasion. They are moral relativists, sophists in the pejorative sense of
the word‘sophist’, and they teach their students to be sophists as well.
Scholarly opinion nowadays holds that the picture one gets of the ancient
rhetorical tradition from Plato’s dialogues is seriously distorted. Some of them
were indeed sophists in the pejorative sense of that term. But in general it
seems that they were not as relativist in their ethics, nor as cynically manipu-
lative in their strategies, as Plato suggests.
Be that as it may, the Renaissance humanists can be seen as carrying on the
ancient rhetorical tradition—albeit with some important differences. One
difference was that at the core of the humanist movement was a philological
study of the ancient texts with the goal of what came to be callederuditioor
erudition.^4 To this day the term‘erudite’connotes someone who is learned in
texts. There was nothing likeeruditioin the ancient rhetorical tradition, for the
obvious reason that the ancient teachers of rhetoric were themselves writing
the texts that would become the subject of erudite scholarship by the Renais-
sance humanists.
(^3) William Bouwsma,John Calvin: A Sixteenth-Century Portrait(Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1988), 118.
(^4) Bouwsma,John Calvin, 117.
The Christian Humanism of John Calvin 79