The History of Philosophy, page 23
Ficino’s reference to rhetoric signals an important aspect of the intellectual turn in the Renaissance. Because it was an age in which intellectual endeavour was assumed to have, as its chief interest, life as actually lived, the relationship between logic, ethics and rhetoric was regarded as an intimate one. The theory of rhetoric says that, to attain maximum effect in persuading or educating an audience, composing a speech or treatise has to go through several important stages. These were inventio, the gathering of material and information, dispositio, the arrangement of the material, and elocutio, its appropriate expression in language. If it were a speech that was being prepared, then memoria, learning it by heart, and pronuntiatio, practising emphases, pacing, pauses, gestures and general manner of delivery, would be essential too. The dispositio stage had its own structure: exordium, introduction, narratio, setting out the case, divisio, specifying the chief points of the argument, confutatio, refuting objections, conclusio or peroratio, summing up and conclusion. Forensic speech of all kinds, political and legal; exhortation and instruction; invocation of principles or historical examples in order to influence the choices, decisions and actions of both individuals and rulers; all these addressed actual practical concerns. Accordingly rhetoric was not an academic exercise merely.
At the heart of rhetoric lies language, and therefore a focus on the first subject of the trivium, the medieval school curriculum of grammar, rhetoric and logic, acquired renewed significance. Originally it just meant the study of Latin, but now it reasserted its relevance to ethics, because rhetoric is about persuading, influencing, advising and challenging, and therefore immediately applies to ethical debate. Renaissance intellectuals looked not to the medieval writers, who had on the whole neglected rhetoric in preference for a technical interest in logic, but to the treatises on rhetoric and poetics of Aristotle and Horace, and in their commentaries on them and on Cicero emphasized both ethical and psychological aspects. Petrarch led the way in this recalibration of interest, but hundreds of treatises on rhetoric followed, many of the leading thinkers of the Renaissance contributing to the debate that linked rhetoric to the idea of the vita activa so much extolled in that epoch.
It is natural for an historian of philosophy to question whether the Renaissance emphasis on rhetoric represented a genuine contribution to philosophy, or whether – as some in the Renaissance itself argued – rhetoric is in fact anti-philosophical. Plato made a comeback in the Renaissance, his works appearing in Latin and attaining considerable influence, and his strictures against the sophists and their rhetorical tricks in his Gorgias (translated into Latin by Leonardo Bruni) were known. To those sceptical about whether the Renaissance did more than opportunistically help itself to rhetorically useful smatterings of philosophy from one or another source, they could point to the paradoxes, inconsistencies and relativism that resulted. The response is to say that thinking about the complexities of real life, the hard choices people are often forced to make, the changes and variabilities of experience and circumstance, of course results in the appearance of inconsistency. The Renaissance rhetoricians could claim that philosophy, which seeks absolutes, has the luxury of ignoring realities, while rhetoric respects and addresses them. They could cite Aristotle’s point in his Rhetoric that this art or techne is central to the practicalities of life and society, and quote Cicero’s remark that ‘to us orators belong the broad estates of wisdom and learning.’ And they could observe with Cicero that Plato himself was a formidable exponent of rhetoric in his writings.
It is however undeniable that the concerns of many of the Renaissance thinkers were far removed from the technical debates of the Schoolmen and their successors, even those who claimed adherence to the revived Platonism of their time. The Platonist revival, and humanism, are interesting; interesting also but in a quite different way is the intellectual energy invested by Renaissance thinkers in magic, alchemy, astrology, Hermeticism and the Cabala. All of these ‘occult sciences’ saw a tremendous upsurge especially in those parts of Europe which had been removed from the sphere of the Roman Church by the Reformation, the chief reason being that the religious authorities in Protestant parts of Europe did not have the authority or, more to the point, the power to stop an ebullition of interest in them. The drivers of this interest were the desire for eternal youth, immortality and wealth gained by transforming base metals into gold (or by persuading others that one could by one’s ‘skill’ provide any of these).fn1 As we see in Part III below, ‘Modern Philosophy’, it was in reaction to this that the science and philosophy of the sixteenth and especially seventeenth centuries arose.
RENAISSANCE PLATONISM
As the discussion above has shown, the dominance of Aristotle in later Scholastic philosophy brought with it tensions resulting in charges and counter-charges of heresy because of the bearing of philosophical disputes on theological doctrines. The combination of Plato’s views and Neoplatonist interpretations of them made him a far more congenial and irenic figure from a Christian point of view, especially for Christians not embroiled in the fierce metaphysical disputes of the Schools. Indeed Platonic views were regarded as positively inspirational from a Christian perspective, and mystical significance was attached to his writings. His reintroduction was therefore welcomed by many Renaissance intellectuals.
Platonism did not usurp Aristotelianism, not by a long way; but interest in it had the effect of weakening the latter’s authority, giving later philosophers and scientists, especially those in the seventeenth century, a less difficult task in rejecting it.
The Platonist revival is datable to a specific event in a specific place: Florence in the year 1439. In the previous year an ecumenical conference had been moved to Florence from Ferrara because plague had broken out in the latter city. This conference, a highly controversial one, ostensibly had the aim of healing the breach between the Orthodox and Catholic communions, but it was entangled with a variety of other complex matters, not least the powers of the papacy and military tensions between the Holy Roman Empire and the Ottoman Empire. Cosimo de’ Medici the Elder, Florence’s de facto ruler and founder of the Medicean dynasty, was a man of great culture, and embraced the opportunity provided by the transfer of the conference to welcome Byzantine scholars who accompanied the ambassadors from Constantinople. One of them was George Gemistos (1355–1452), known as Plethon.
Plethon was the leading scholar in Byzantium in that era, and a Neoplatonist. In 1439 he lectured in Florence on Plato and the differences between Plato and Aristotle, to Plato’s credit and Aristotle’s discredit. The lectures were later published under that descriptive title, De Differentiis Aristotelis et Platonis. This book naturally enough sparked a controversy, in which defenders of Aristotle attempted to discredit Plato by claiming that Platonism was in fact a religion which sought to rival Christianity. That was the allegation levelled at Plethon by George of Trebizond, a vehement Aristotelian who served for a time as secretary to the equally enthusiastic Aristotelian Pope Nicholas V. George’s Comparatio Philosophorum Aristotelis et Platonis, to which Cardinal Basilios Bessarion, a former student of Plethon, replied in In Calumniatorem Platonis (‘Against the Calumniator of Plato’), is a mixture of enormous learning and intemperate, almost lunatic, polemic.fn2
But Plethon had achieved his desired effect: interest in Plato was vitally stimulated, as was an interest in learning Greek so that Plato could be read in the original. The fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453 drove its scholars into a diaspora, among them John Argyropoulos (1415–87), who had earlier in life studied at Padua and now returned to Italy as his chosen place of exile. He settled in Florence and lectured on both the Greek language and philosophy. One of his pupils was Marsilio Ficino, who went on to translate Plato’s works into Latin and to head the Platonic Academy founded and funded by Cosimo de’ Medici in Florence. Ficino also translated writings by Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus – and less helpfully, perhaps, the Hermetic Corpus which played such a large part in the promotion of ‘occult sciences’ then and afterwards.
The Platonic Academy was more a club than a university, but it was the single most influential body for diffusing Platonic ideas in fifteenth-century Europe. Ficino’s role was central. In addition to translating all the works of Plato into Latin he wrote a work entitled Platonic Theology, which was both an introduction to Neoplatonism and an argument for its consistency with Christianity. He said that human souls are, in their immortality, the link between the abstract world of ideas and the material world, and they are what confer on human beings their special dignity. Inspired by Plato’s idea of the ascent to love of the Good in the Symposium he coined the term ‘Platonic love’ to describe the soul’s love for God when, after ascending through levels of knowledge, it achieves unmediated contact with him.
Ficino’s desire to synthesize Platonic philosophy and Hermeticism with Christianity was shared by his student Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–94), who managed in his short life to give both humanism and the occult sciences a boost.
Pico was an aristocrat, the youngest son in a family that ruled Concordia and Modena in Italy and was related to a number of other leading Italian houses – the Sforza, Este and Gonzaga. He was precociously brilliant, and his mother wished him to enter the Church, against his inclination. She died when he was studying canon law at Bologna, freeing him to turn his attention to philosophy, going first to Florence and then to Paris to do so. His studies were eclectic, and in addition to philosophy, Latin and Greek he acquired a knowledge of Hebrew and Arabic, and became acquainted with Chaldean and Zoroastrian ideas and the mysticism of the Cabala (otherwise spelt ‘Kabbalah’).
On his return from Paris to Florence Pico met and studied with Marsilio Ficino, who introduced him to Lorenzo de’ Medici. The first encounter between Pico and Ficino occurred on a day which Ficino had determined, by astrological means, to be most propitious for the publication of his Plato translations. Pico was sceptical about astrology, but this difference of view did not stand in the way of their relationship, nor of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s admiration for him.
Indeed without Lorenzo’s support it is unlikely that Pico would have survived the next steps in his career, the most immediate of which was an adulterous affair that nearly ended in his being killed by the irate husband in the case. More risky still, however, was his plan to issue a challenge in Rome to all the scholars of Europe to debate his 900 Theses, a work he had begun composing while in Paris and which had since been expanded by his studies of treatises on magic, the Cabala and Hermetic texts. This eclectic array of sources had a Platonist foundation, as demonstrated by the essay he wrote to accompany and explain the intent behind the theses, The Oration on the Dignity of Man.
The opening words of Pico’s Oration are: ‘Most esteemed Fathers, I have read in the ancient writings of the Arabians that Abdala the Saracen on being asked what, on this stage, so to say, of the world, seemed to him most evocative of wonder, replied that there was nothing to be seen more marvellous than man. And that celebrated exclamation of Hermes Trismegistus, “What a great miracle is man, Asclepius”, confirms this opinion.’ Although a large part of the intent of the Oration was to seek legitimization for a syncretistic inclusion of the Cabala and other mystical and supposedly ancient wisdoms into Christian thinking, its primary effect was a rousing celebration of the worth of humankind and everything associated with life in the world – a 90-degree shift of focus from anxiety about getting safely into the afterlife at all costs. This is the key to humanism in the Renaissance; Pico’s Oration has been described as a key text in capturing its essence.
Among the enquiries to be fostered and celebrated, said Pico citing Plato, is mathematics. In the Renaissance there was a close association, in the minds of nervous people, between mathematics and the occult arts; the terms ‘calculating’ and ‘conjuring’ were often used interchangeably. Legitimizing mathematics meant legitimizing all the other suspect enquiries. Pico argued that to search for knowledge anywhere and everywhere raised humankind above the rest of creation and led to closeness to God, just as Plato had argued that knowledge of the Forms and especially the Form of the Good is the great aspiration of philosophical endeavour.
In extolling the philosophical virtues of mathematics Pico was in agreement with his older contemporary Nicholas of Cusa (1401–64), the German scholar and mystic who viewed mathematics as the highest knowledge because it alone is certain. This view placed Plato’s scheme of knowledge above Aristotle’s empiricist interest in the natural sciences. Preferring Plato to Aristotle did not stop Nicholas from reliance on empirical methodology in certain respects; to him is attributed the idea of measuring a patient’s pulse rate by means of a water clock. But Pico’s interest in numerology and mystical implications of the alphabet place him in the tradition of Platonism which takes licence from the Timaeus, and from Plato’s use of the technique of stating his doctrines in the form of revelations by deities, for emphasizing the mystical and revelatory over the empirical.
It is perhaps a contradiction that Pico’s valorizing of humanism is not his chief legacy, which instead is the strain of Christian Cabalism he helped to promote. Raymond Lull in thirteenth-century Spain had been the first to take an interest in the Christian possibilities of Cabala, but Pico gave the idea greater currency. He was followed in succeeding centuries by Johann Reuchlin, Paolo Riccio, Athanasius Kircher and others. For Pico himself and the Platonic Academy in Florence, the tumultuous political circumstances of the late fifteenth century brought the Florentine promotion of Platonism to an end. When Lorenzo de’ Medici died in 1492 – a year of other major events: the expulsion of the Moors and Jews from Spain, Columbus’ ‘discovery’ of the New World, the publication of Leoniceno’s ‘On the Errors of Pliny’, threats of invasion of Italy by France (which followed in reality in 1494) – the Platonic Academy was closed, and within two years Pico (and his fellow-humanist Poliziano – Angelo Ambrogini, 1454–94, also known as Politian) had died in suspicious circumstances, quite likely murdered.
RENAISSANCE HUMANISM
Today the word ‘humanist’ denotes a person who has a non-religious ethical outlook. In the Renaissance context it denotes scholars and intellectuals who believed that the studia humanitatis of grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry and ethics would help to develop rounded and effective citizens dedicated to an intelligent vita activa. The source and inspiration for the material of these studies was explicitly classical antiquity, and explicitly not medieval Scholasticism. The rediscovery and valorization of the intellectual culture of classical times was expressly seen as a rebirth – renaissance – by the leaders of the new movement, and its central defining feature is humanism.
The fourteenth-century poet and diplomat Francesco Petrarca (1304–74), more familiarly known as Petrarch, is called ‘the Father of Humanism’ because his collecting of ancient manuscripts, advocacy of the value of classical thought and letters, and description of the period between classical antiquity and his own time’s rediscovery of its values as the ‘middle ages’ make him the self-aware promoter of a new outlook. His great fame as a poet in his own lifetime helped to spread his influence and ignite in other breasts a similar passion for the classical past. This included enthusiasm for finding forgotten manuscripts in monasteries and dusty archives, and encouraging their translation and publication, an enthusiasm shared to great good effect by others such as Petrarch’s friend Giovanni Boccaccio, the Ciceronian Coluccio Salutati and, later, Poggio Bracciolini.
Boccaccio (1313–75) is best known for the Decameron, a collection of witty, perceptive and sometimes ribald tales written in a naturalistic manner in vernacular Italian. He was appointed by the Florentine signoria (the city state’s ruling council) to provide Petrarch with hospitality when the latter visited Florence in 1350, and they became fast friends. Petrarch encouraged Boccaccio to study classical literature; Boccaccio called him ‘my teacher and master’, and the fruit was his encyclopaedia of Greek and Roman mythology, the Genealogia Deorum Gentilium, a key text for Renaissance humanism and art.
Coluccio Salutati (1331–1406), the great Chancellor of Florence whose letters were described by his arch-rival Giangaleazzo Visconti, Duke of Milan, as each more dangerous than a thousand cavalrymen, modelled his beautiful writing style on Cicero, and spent a fortune on collecting ancient manuscripts, in the process rediscovering Cicero’s Epistulae ad Familiares (‘Letters to his Friends’) which contain commentary and argument on the loss of Rome’s republican liberties. Salutati’s late work De Tyranno (‘On the Tyrant’) owed much to Cicero’s views. He was a generous promoter of talented younger contemporaries, Poggio Bracciolini (1380–1459) among them.
One of the greatest finds made by burrowing into old monastic libraries and archives is owed to Bracciolini. He sent his scouts far afield in search of manuscripts, into Germany, Switzerland and France as well as across Italy, and recovered a large number of lost works, by far the most significant being the De Rerum Natura of Lucretius. His position as papal secretary was a help in this endeavour, and he became rich as a result; the sale of a manuscript of Livy funded the purchase of a handsome villa in the valley of the Arno which he filled with antiquities.
Bracciolini engaged in a celebrated dispute with the philologist Lorenzo Valla (1407–57), whose work on the elegances of Latin literature, defence of Epicurus on pleasure, and exposure of the fraudulent ‘Donation of Constantine’ by linguistic detective work had made him famous. Valla argued that biblical texts should be subjected to the same philological analysis as texts by the classical authors. Bracciolini countered that secular and divine literature should be treated differently. Their battle was conducted in a series of detailed publications, and ended – though Bracciolini at one point described Valla as ‘insane’ for thinking as he did – in the two becoming friends. It was not until the nineteenth century in Germany that Valla’s views about the application of radical criticism to biblical texts were fully implemented.
