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1 The Two Faces of Humanism Stoicism and Augustinianism in Renaissance Thought
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IV. The Augustinian Strain in the Renaissance

Stoicism, then, had both attractions and weaknesses as the basis for accommodation to the conditions of Renaissance life, and these were not unrelated to one another. It identified the major problems of modern existence, often vividly and concretely, as the schoolmen did not. It reaffirmed in a new form a traditional vision of universal order which seemed an attractive prescription for the practical evils of a singularly disorderly society. It affirmed personal responsibility, its inwardness corresponded to the growing inwardness of later medieval piety, and it promised consolation for the tribulations of existence. But the structure of assumptions that enabled Stoic humanism to perform these services was not altogether adequate to the changing needs of a new society. Its conception of a universal order was singularly contradicted by the concrete world of familiar experience, and its idealism, however plausible in theory, ran the risk of seeming as irrelevant to life as the great systems of the schoolmen. Its intellectual vision of man was hardly adequate to a world in which men constantly encountered each other not as disembodied minds but as integral personalities whose bodies could not be ignored, whose passions were vividly and often positively as well as dangerously in evidence, and whose actions were profoundly unpredictable. The Stoic idea of freedom was too elevated to have much general application, and also severely limited by the large area of determinism in Stoic thought. And Stoicism appeared often to ignore or to reason away rather than to engage with and solve the practical problems of life; its disapproval of cities, of political particularity and individual eccentricity, of change, demonstrated the high-mindedness of its adherents, but it did not cause these awkward realities to go away. And it was scarcely helpful, especially since even the Stoic had no remedy for the misery of the overwhelming majority of mankind, to deny that suffering was real because it belonged to the lower world of appearances, or to direct the attention of wretched men from mutable to eternal things, or to insist that the world ought to be one and to be ruled by the wise. Like ancient Stoicism, therefore, the Stoic humanism of the Renaissance was ultimately hopeless. It is thus hardly surprising that, like the Stoicism of the hellenistic world, it was contested, within humanism itself, by another and very different vision of man, his potentialities, and his place in the universe. The great patron of this vision was Saint Augustine.

Here too Petrarch's Secretum , which I have frequently exploited to illustrate the Stoic elements in humanist thought, is singularly instruc-


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tive. For, despite the ambiguities of this work, which foreshadow the perennial tension between the Stoic and Augustinian impulses in the Renaissance, it makes one clear point. It calls back to life the great Latin father who had virtually disappeared from Dante's intellectual universe, and it recalls him, however dimly realized, as a person. The personal appearance of Augustine in Petrarch's world of thought, only a generation after the completion of the Divine Comedy , may thus be taken as a kind of watershed between medieval and Renaissance culture. But it also suggests the crucial polarities within humanism itself.

For although Petrarch often makes Augustine into an ancient sage, a spokesman for the commonplaces of hellenistic moral thought who repeatedly quotes Cicero, Seneca, and other Latin writers, the Scriptures hardly at all, and although the Franciscus of the dialogues often seems more truly Augustinian than Augustine himself, the work gives eloquent testimony to the need of an anguished man of the fourteenth century not only for abstract wisdom but for a direct encounter with another human being in the past whose spiritual experience, as an individual, might be a source of nourishment for himself. Petrarch's Augustinus, however equivocal, is in the end not Truth itself, for a direct encounter with truth, Petrarch suggests, is more than man can bear.[108] He is a man, however venerable, who performs the role of one man with another. He listens and reacts to the confession of Franciscus, argues with him, not always successfully, and compels him to look more deeply and honestly into himself.

This humanization of Augustine, however incomplete, was a notable achievement. Because Augustine was a Christian, a saint, and still the most venerated source of religious wisdom in the West outside of Scripture itself, he provided the ultimate test for a typically Renaissance impulse, which Petrarch applied more successfully to such pagan worthies as Cicero or Seneca, and even to Aristotle. That he could manage it at all with Augustine testifies to the intensity of a new vision of existence even in its earliest stages. A fresh breeze had begun to blow in the old European atmosphere.

The uses of Augustine in the Renaissance did not always reflect this new awareness of his personality. He continued, with some regularity, to be cited in the old way as a guarantor of the highest truths. The later fifteenth-century Roman humanist Benedetto Morandi, for example, thought it "not only wicked but foolhardy" to oppose him;[109] and Melanchthon generally thought (though he did not always adhere to this opinion) that agreement with Augustine was virtually identical with Christian orthodoxy.[110] But it became increasingly common to praise


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him for his eloquence,[111] a human competence in which Renaissance rhetoricians might aspire to emulate him, or to call attention to dimensions of his personality or his earthly life, a tendency not confined to humanists. Gerson described his own mother as a "Saint Monica,"[112] and Vives observed that "if Augustine lived now, he would be considered a pedant or a petty orator."[113] And it became possible to take issue with Augustine, at least by implication; Poggio testifies to this in his attack on the presumption of Valla in implying that "the blessed Augustine also (such is the pride of this man, or rather of this brute) would have fallen into error about fate, the Trinity, and divine providence."[114] So thoroughgoing an Augustinian as Staupitz thought that Augustine "had no idea of the depths of the mystery of the Incarnation."[115]

But the humanization of Augustinianism has a larger significance for our purposes. It directs us to a crucial difference between Stoic and Augustinian humanism and helps to explain the very different order in which it is necessary, in the following pages, to analyze the latter. With Stoicism we must begin with the cosmos, and this in turn implies a certain view of man. But with Augustinianism we must begin with man, and from here we reach a certain view of the cosmos.[116] In Augustinian humanism the nature and experience of man himself limit what can be known about the larger universes to which man belongs and how he can accommodate to them.

Thus Augustinian humanism saw man, not as a system of objectively distinguishable, discrete faculties reflecting ontological distinctions in the cosmos, but as a mysterious and organic unity. This conception, despite every tendency in his thought to the contrary, is repeatedly apparent in Petrarch, in the Secretum and elsewhere, and it explains Melanchthon's indifference to the value of distinguishing the various faculties of the human personality.[117] One result was a marked retreat from the traditional sense of opposition between soul and body. Bruni found support for the notion of their interdependence in Aristotle,[118] and Valla, as Maffeo Vegio, vigorously rejected the possibility of distinguishing the pleasures of the soul from those of the body;[119] Pomponazzi's notorious refutation of the soul's immortality must be understood against this background. A corollary of this position is that the soul cannot be seen as a higher faculty in man, a spark of divinity which is intrinsically immune from sin and can only be corrupted from below. Petrarch confessed that, in the end, his troubles came rather from his soul than his body;[120] and Calvin was only applying this insight in his insistence that the Fall of Adam had its origins in deeper regions of the personality. "They childishly err," he wrote against a hellenistic under-


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standing of Christianity, "who regard original sin as consisting only in lust and in the disorderly motion of the appetites, whereas it seizes upon the very seat of reason and upon the whole heart."[121] It follows, therefore, that the distinctive quality of man cannot be his reason. Valla identified it with his immortality,[122] Calvin with his capacity to know and worship God.[123] It also follows that the abstract knowledge grasped by reason is not sufficient to make men virtuous and therefore blessed, a point made with considerable emphasis by Petrarch in praising oratory above philosophy; thus Aristotle suffered as a moralist in comparison with Cicero, whom Petrarch now exploited in his less Stoic mood.[124] Since to know the good could no longer be identified with doing the good, it might also now be necessary to make a choice between knowledge and virtue, and the Augustinian humanist regularly came out on the side of virtue.

Despite their underlying belief in the integral unity of the personality, the Augustinian humanists accepted and argued in terms of the old vocabulary of the faculties; but the faculties they chose to emphasize implied a very different conception of the organization of man from that of the Stoics. They spoke above all of the will. Petrarch recognized clearly that Augustine's own conversion had been a function of his will rather than his intellect,[125] and Calvin was similarly Augustinian in recognizing the crucial importance of the will in the economy of salvation.[126] But the essential point in this conception of the will was its separation from and its elevation above reason. "It is safer," Petrarch declared, "to strive for a good and pious will than for a capable and clear intellect. . . . It is better to will the good than to know the truth."[127] Melanchthon was developing the implications of this view in saying that "knowledge serves the will. . . . For the will in man corresponds to the place of a despot in a republic. Just as the senate is subject to the despot, so is knowledge to the will, with the consequence that although knowledge gives warning, yet the will casts knowledge out and is borne along by its own affection."[128] One consequence was a new degree of freedom for the will, always severely restricted by the Stoic conception of the will as the automatic servant of reason. Salutati recognized this with particular clarity. Nothing, he wrote, could "even reach the intellect without the consent or command of the will," and once knowledge had penetrated the intellect, the will could freely follow or disregard it.[129] Valla saw in the freedom of the will the only conception of the matter consistent with the evident reality of sin, which would be impossible, and man would be deprived of responsibility and moral dignity, if reason in fact ruled will.[130]


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The will, in this view, is seen to take its direction not from reason but from the affections, which are in turn not merely the disorderly impulses of the treacherous body but expressions of the energy and quality of the heart, that mysterious organ which is the center of the personality, the source of its unity and its ultimate worth. The affections, therefore, are intrinsically neither good nor evil but the essential resources of the personality; and since they make possible man's beatitude and glory as well as his depravity, they are, in Augustinian humanism, treated with particular respect. Thus even when Augustinus recommended Franciscus to meditate on the eternal verities, he called on him to invest his thought with affect, as a necessary sign that he has not meditated in vain.[131] Valla was especially emphatic about the positive quality of the passions, a primary consideration both in his perception of the particular importance of oratorical as opposed to philosophical communication and in the understanding of Christianity. "Can a man move his listeners to anger or mercy if he has not himself first felt these passions?" he asked. "It cannot be," he continued; "So he will not be able to kindle the love of divine things in the minds of others who is himself cold to that love."[132] For Valla religious experience was not intellectual but affective; the love of God is to be understood as man's ultimate pleasure. Calvin was working out the same line of thought in arguing, against the schools, that "the assent which we give to the divine word . . . is more of the heart than the brain, and more of the affections than the understanding. . . . faith is absolutely inseparable from a devout affection."[133] Prayer, he observed in the Geneva Confession, "is nothing but hypocrisy and fantasy unless it proceed from the interior affections of the heart";[134] and because of its power to rouse the heart he vigorously supported congregational singing.[135] Melanchthon remarked on the irrepressible power of the affections: "When an affection has begun to rage and seethe, it cannot be kept from breaking forth."[136] Against the scholastic view of the affections as a "weakness of nature," he argued that, on the contrary, "the heart and its affections must be the highest and most powerful part of man." Thus he saw that the consequence of control over the affections (if such control were truly possible) would be not rationality but insincerity, the presentation not of a higher and rational self to the world but of an inauthentic self.[137] We may find in this psychological discussion, therefore, a shrewd contribution to Renaissance concern, another reflection of social disruption, with the problems of friendship and hypocrisy.

This sense of the power and positive value of the passions was frequently the basis of an explicit attack on the Stoic ideal of apatheia , a


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point on which Stoicism seemed peculiarly unconvincing. Salutati doubted that "any mortal ever attained to such perfection besides Christ."[138] Brandolini denied that Stoic virtue could be truly divine because of its rejection of feeling, "for whoever lack affects necessarily lack virtues."[139] Erasmus denounced Stoic apathy in the Praise of Folly ,[140] as did the young Calvin, citing Augustine; the older Calvin also attacked "the foolish description given by the ancient Stoics of 'the great-souled man'" and also denounced "new Stoics who count it depraved not only to groan and weep but also to be sad and care-ridden." We, he declared, citing Christ's tears, "have nothing to do with this iron-hearted philosophy."[141]

This same vision of man relieved the body of its old responsibility for evil and dignified its needs. Calvin particularly emphasized the error of associating sin primarily with the body; this mistake tended to make men "easily forgive themselves the most shocking vices as no sins at all." He traced the growth of this error historically, from the philosophers of antiquity, "till at length man was commonly thought to be corrupted only in his sensual part, and to have a perfectly unblemished reason and a will also largely unimpaired."[142] Such a view required a fresh understanding of the Pauline meaning of "flesh." It had to be construed, not narrowly as the physical body, but more broadly as those tendencies that alienated every part of man from God.[143] Melanchthon thought that "flesh" must especially signify reason, the site of unbelief.[144]

At the same time the impulses of the body could be viewed more tolerantly. Augustinus waived, for Franciscus, the strict Stoic doctrine regarding man's physical needs in favor of the golden mean,[145] and Calvin argued that "God certainly did not intend that man should be slenderly and sparingly sustained; but rather . . . he promises a liberal abundance, which should leave nothing wanting to a sweet and pleasant life."[146] He insisted on the legitimacy of pleasure, at least in moderation; severity on this score would lead to "the very dangerous error of fettering consciences more tightly than does the word of the Lord." Calvin was thinking of the monks, but the point applied equally to Stoic moralism.[147] It applied especially to sex, so often the special worry of traditional moralists because of its association with the body. Civic humanism had long applauded the family as the source of new citizens, and Valla had suggested a positive view of sex because it gave pleasure. But the sense, among the Augustinian humanists, of the integrity of the personality also provided a deeper foundation for the value of the sexual bond. As Bucer declared, "There is no true marriage without a true assent of hearts between those who make the agreement," and marriage


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is accordingly "a contract not only of body and of goods but also of the soul."[148] Calvin praised marriage, attributing disapproval of it to "immoderate affection for virginity."[149] A higher estimate of the body and of sex led also to some perception of the dignity of women.[150]

This better view of the body had even wider ramifications. It was related to Renaissance debate over the value of the active life, for the alleged inferiority of activity to contemplation assumed the inferiority to the mind of the body, which does the active business of the world. It also had deep theological significance, for it redirected attention from the immortality of the soul to the resurrection of the body; the more Augustinian humanist was likely to emphasize the central importance of the resurrection. Thus, although Petrarch often spoke of the soul, he had also learned "the hope of resurrection, and that this very body after death will be reassumed, indeed agile, shining, and inviolable, with much glory in the resurrection."[151] Calvin saw with particular clarity (and here his relation to Pomponazzi is evident) that "the life of the soul without hope of resurrection will be a mere dream."[152] And this Augustinian anthropology also posed the question of human freedom and man's need for grace in a new way. If it freed the will from obedience to reason, it perceived that this only meant the bondage of the will to the affections of the heart. And this meant that man can only be saved by grace, not by knowledge; for knowledge can at best reach only the mind, but grace alone can change the heart.[153]

It thus precluded the natural theology towards which Stoic humanism tended; its theology regularly opposed the folly of the cross to the rational wisdom of the philosophers.[154] Augustinus thus urged on Franciscus the irrelevance to his own deepest needs of that knowledge of nature on whose religious significance the Stoic set so much store.[155] In reply to his own more Stoic vision of the order of the universe, Calvin insisted on the actual inability of men, as the vain and contradictory speculations of the philosophers clearly demonstrated, to discover religious truths from nature.[156] Valla had argued that philosophy was the mother of heresy.[157] The Augustinian humanist was clear that, however valuable they might be for other purposes, the classics, based on reason alone, were valueless for Christianity. There was, Petrarch suggested, a qualitative difference between knowledge and faith, which he saw as something like the difference between seeing and listening: the difference, that is to say, between learning by means of one's own natural powers and learning directly, and so with peculiar certainty, from God.[158] Thus an Augustinian anthropology was fundamental to the new emphasis among humanists on the Bible, on the "school of the Gospel,"


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which Budé contrasted with the Stoa as well as the Academy and the "subtle debates of the Peripatetics."[159]

Ultimate truth, then, is mysterious, beyond rational comprehension, and therefore first planted in the heart by grace, not discovered by the mind. "It is not man's part to investigate the celestial mystery through his own powers," Petrarch declared after emphasizing the gulf between God the creator and man his creature;[160] and Petrarch's sense of the incalculability of the world was carried by Salutati to a more general skepticism. "Every truth which is grasped by reason," Salutati wrote, "can be made doubtful by a contrary reason"; consequently man's rational knowledge cannot be absolute but, at best, is "a kind of reasonable uncertainty."[161] Valla humanized knowledge by representing truth as a matter not of objective certainty but of believing and feeling "concerning things as they themselves are."[162] And this notion of truth was hardly appropriate to the kind of conviction required by the Gospel. Accordingly philosophy, when it approached religious questions, was, for Melanchthon, a "chaos of carnal dreams"; the sacred mysteries, he insisted, should be adored, not investigated.[163] Calvin, since "human reason neither approaches, nor strives, nor takes straight aim" toward religious truth, suggested that a skeptical agnosticism was the best posture for men without revelation: "Here man's discernment is so overwhelmed and so fails that the first step of advancement in the school of the Lord is to renounce it."[164] This skepticism is obviously fundamental to the humanist case for the superiority of rhetoric to philosophy; like Scripture, rhetoric recognized the weakness of reason and spoke to the heart.

The Augustinian humanist recognized a very different tendency in Stoicism and occasionally displayed some insight into the affinities of Stoicism with medieval intellectuality. Valla sometimes used "Stoicism" to represent philosophy in general, by which he meant both ancient and medieval philosophy;[165] and Brandolini pointed to the rational (and for him specious) methodology which the Stoics shared with "almost all the philosophers and theologians of our time."[166] Calvin noted the "Stoic paradoxes and scholastic subtleties" in Seneca.[167] Here, then, is another area in which the tensions between Stoic and Augustinian humanism were threatening to break out into the open.

But all this was evidently the reflection of a more general insistence, within Augustinian humanism, on man's absolute dependence on his creator, which contrasted sharply with the Stoic tendency to emphasize man's sufficiency. This sense of human dependence is especially apparent in the Augustinian attitude to virtue, the supreme good of the Stoic.


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Valla thought the Stoic ideal of the sage a contradiction in terms, if only because the triumph of virtue implied constant struggle; Stoic serenity was therefore unattainable.[168] Brandolini doubted that virtue could overcome suffering.[169] The examples of ancient virtue adduced as models by the Stoic humanist thus required some analysis. It might be remarked in general, as Petrarch and Erasmus did, that "true" virtue could not be attributed to any pagan, since his actions were obviously not done in the love of Christ.[170] Valla went beyond such generality to suggest that pagan virtue was vitiated by its concern for glory,[171] a point the young Calvin also emphasized. "Remove ambition," he wrote, "and you will have no haughty spirits, neither Platos, nor Catos, nor Scaevolas, nor Scipios, nor Fabriciuses." He saw the Roman Empire as "a great robbery," a notion also bearing on the Stoic ideal of a universal state.[172] Melanchthon viewed the virtues that enabled Alexander to conquer an empire simply as evidence that he loved glory more than pleasure.[173] These humanists did not deny the practical value of the alleged virtues of the pagans, but they insisted on distinguishing between the restraint of human nature and its purification, which only grace could accomplish. From this standpoint the Stoic ideal was shallow and therefore, in the end, unreliable. Christianity, as Melanchthon remarked, was not primarily concerned with virtue, and the pursuit of instruction on this topic in the Scriptures "is more philosophical than Christian."[174]

In fact a deeper knowledge of the self revealed that, like his knowledge of God, man's virtue and happiness also come entirely from God. To realize this was the goal of self-knowledge. Such knowledge, Calvin declared, "will strip us of all confidence in our own ability, deprive us of all occasion for boasting, and lead us to submission";[175] and Petrarch's own spiritual biography may be understood as a prolonged search for this kind of knowledge. It taught man, for example, the precise opposite of Stoic wisdom. Against the Stoic notion that blessedness can be founded only on the things that are man's own, Petrarch argued directly that in fact the only things that are a man's own are his sins; thus "in what is in one's own power" there is chiefly "matter of shame and fear."[176] There is an obvious connection between this interest in self-knowledge and the Pauline teaching on the moral law as the tutor of mankind, a conception again quite at odds with the Stoic notion of the function of law. If Petrarch's self-knowledge brought him to despair, he could take hope if only "the Almighty Pity put forth his strong right hand and guide my vessel rightly ere it be too late, and bring me to shore." God was the only source of his virtues (these are clearly not his


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own), of his blessedness, of his very existence: "In what state could I better die than in loving, praising, and remembering him, without whose constant love I should be nothing, or damned, which is less than nothing? And if his love for me should cease, my damnation would have no end."[177] Peace itself, the essence of Stoic beatitude, could only be the consequence, not of "some human virtue," Brandolini contended, but of grace.[178]

But there are, for the general development of European culture, even broader implications in the sense, within Augustinian humanism, of man's intellectual limitations. It pointed to the general secularization of modern life, for it implied the futility of searching for the principles of human order in the divine order of the cosmos, which lay beyond human comprehension. Man was accordingly now seen to inhabit not a single universal order governed throughout by uniform principles but a multiplicity of orders: for example, an earthly as well as a heavenly city, which might be seen to operate in quite different ways. On earth, unless God had chosen to reveal his will about its arrangements unequivocally in Scripture, man was left to the uncertain and shifting insights of a humbler kind of reason, to work out whatever arrangements best suited his needs. Hence a sort of earthy practicality was inherent in this way of looking at the human condition.

Indeed it is likely that the sharp Augustinian distinction between creation and Creator, since it denied the enternity of the universe, also promoted that secularization of the cosmos implicit in the Copernican revolution. If human order no longer depended on the intelligible order of the cosmos, the motive for discerning any such order was seriously weakened; conversely much of the resistance to Copernicanism stemmed from a concern, so strong in Stoic humanism, to protect a universal order that supplied mankind with general guidance for its earthly arrangements. Galileo relied heavily on Augustine to support his argument that the proper concern of religion is how one goes to heaven, not how heaven goes.[179]

If Machiavelli is the most famous example of the secularizing tendency in the Renaissance, he also had predecessors among earlier humanists of an Augustinian tendency. But the secularism implicit in Augustinian humanism achieved its clearest articulation in figures connected with the Reformation, not because Protestantism originated the secular impulse, but because, since Stoic arguments had been a major resource to support the old order, they now required a more direct attack. Calvin distinguished with particular clarity between the heavenly and earthly realms and the kinds of knowledge appropriate to each:


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There is one understanding of earthly things; another of heavenly ones. I call those things earthly which do not pertain to God and his kingdom, to true justice, or to the blessedness of the future life, and are in some sense confined within the limits of it. Heavenly things are the pure knowledge of God, the nature of true righteousness, and the mysteries of the heavenly kingdom. The first class includes government, domestic economy, all the mechanical skills and the liberal arts. In the second are the knowledge of God and of his will, and the rule by which we conform our lives to it.

He was emphatic about the separation between the two, whose correspondence had been so long cited in support of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. There was no basis, he declared, "to philosophize subtly over a comparison of the heavenly and earthly hierarchies," thus challenging not only the Neoplatonism of Dionysius but also the fundamental principles of Stoic world order.[180] By the same token he had no use for idealistic prescriptions for earthly order; he dismissed utopia as "a foolish fantasy the Jews had."[181] For Melanchthon "the civil and external dispensation of things has nothing to do with the Spirit's righteousness, no more than do plowing a field, building, or cobbling shoes."[182] This was not to deny the utility of humbler things but rather to assert that they worked best when it was recognized that they belong to a sphere of their own.

The pragmatic secularism to which Augustinian humanism pointed opposed the political idealism of Stoic humanism in all its dimensions: its belief in the universal principles needed to validate all government, its universalism, its insistence on the rule of the wise, its indifference to changing circumstance, its pacifism. Bruni gave concrete expression to the secularist mood in his own acceptance, without setting them in a larger framework of objective justification, of the common political values of Florence. "I confess that I am moved by what men think good," he wrote in his Florentine Histories: "to extend one's borders, to increase one's power, to extol the splendor and glory of the city, to look after its utility and security."[183] Here is the Machiavellian principle that the affairs of this world should be based on the dynamic interplay of earthly interests whose sordid realities are honestly faced; in short, the eternal reason of the Stoics must, for the practical good of men on earth, give way to reason of state.

This signified that laws and institutions must be accommodated to the variety of the human condition, and thus the desirability of many states with various kinds of government. This, rather than a universal


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empire, was, for Calvin, what God had intended. "If you fix your eye not on one city alone he wrote, "but look round and glance at the world as a whole, or at least cast your sight upon regions farther off, divine providence has wisely arranged that various countries should be ruled by various kinds of government. For as elements cohere only in unequal proportion, so countries are best held together according to their own particular inequality." By the same token civil laws are not primarily the reflection of eternal law but should vary according to practical circumstance. "Every nation," Calvin declared, "is left free to make such laws as it foresees to be profitable for itself."[184] Melanchthon carried this relativism to extremes, finding in it the most likely guarantor of earthly order:

Indeed, the political art covers external action in life. concerning possessions, contracts, and such like, and these are not the same among all nations. Laws are of one kind among the Persians, of another in Athens, or in Rome. Accordingly a Christian dresses differently in one part of the world than in another, reckons days differently in one place than he does in another. Whatever the policy of the place, that he uses; as Ezra judges cases according to Persian law when in Persia, so in Jerusalem he judges according to Jewish law. These things do not belong to the Gospel, any more than do clothes or the spacing of days. This distinction between the Gospel and political affairs is conducive to maintaining tranquility and increasing reverence for the magistrates.[185]

Augustinian humanism was thus closely related, as Stoic humanism was not, to the political realities of contemporary Europe.

In the same way Augustinian humanism attacked the spiritual elitism of the Stoic tradition, both in its loftier forms and in its application to government; and it was thus more sympathetic to those populist movements that found religious expression in the dignity of lay piety, political expression in the challenge of republicanism to despotism. For it was obvious that if rational insight into cosmic order could not supply the principles of either religious or political life, neither the church nor civil society could be governed by sages. This conviction had deep roots in Italian humanism. Charles Trinkaus has presented at least one group of humanists as lay theologians who were concerned to assert the religious competence of ordinary men by their emphasis on Christianity as a religion of grace accessible to all.[186] Valla contrasted the exclusiveness of Stoicism with the popularity of Epicureanism,[187] and he rested his case for eloquence against philosophy largely on the fact that it employed


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the language of ordinary men rather than the specialized vocabulary of an elite who "teach us by an exquisite sort of reasoning both to inquire and answer, which illiterates and rustics do better than philosophers."[188] There is a hint of this attitude even in Castiglione, who was willing to leave the evaluation of his Courtier to public opinion "because more often than not the many, even without perfect knowledge, know by natural instinct the certain savor of good and bad, and, without being able to give any reason for it, enjoy and love one thing and detest another."[189] Augustinian humanism denied any privileged position to a philosophically enlightened class. Calvin attacked the monks on the basis of the equality of all callings before God and broke with traditional humanist elitism by praising the manual as well as the liberal arts.[190] For the church this tendency would culminate in the priesthood of all believers. Melanchthon minimized the specialized competence of the clergy,[191] and Calvin insisted on the popular election of ministers "so as not to diminish any part of the common right and liberty of the church."[192] For civil society this impulse meant the rejection of theocracy, and a fully secular government. "Just as Socrates, at the beginning of the Republic , sent poets out of the state," Melanchthon asserted, "so we would not eject the theologians from the state but we would remove them from the governing group of the commonwealth,"[193] a principle also applied in the Italian republics. Calvin's preference for a republic over other forms of government is well known. "This is the most desirable kind of liberty," he wrote, "that we should not be compelled to obey every person who may be tyrannically put over our heads, but which allows of election, so that no one should rule except he be approved of us."[194] This position did not preclude social hierarchy, but it meant that differences in status among men could only be seen as an accident of history; they are not rooted in the order of the universe, and accordingly social structures can be modified as needs change.

So the willingness to accommodate human institutions to the varieties of circumstance also implied a willingness to acknowledge the significance of change in human affairs. "Now we know," Calvin declared, "that external order admits, and even requires, various changes according to the varying conditions of the times."[195] The historicism of the Renaissance, to which recent scholarship has given much attention, was distinctly not a function of the Stoic tendencies in humanism, which could only view mutability with alarm, but rather of the Augustinian tradition, in which God's purposes were understood to work themselves out in time. Thus for Salutati God "foresaw all that was and will be in time entirely without time and from eternity, and not only did he in-


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fallibly foresee and wish that they occur in their time, but also that through contingency they should be produced and be."[196] Contingency was no longer a threat to order but the fulfillment of a divine plan, and discrete events thus acquired meaning. This repudiation of Stoic stasis opened the way to the feeling for anachronism that we encounter not only in Valla's analysis of the Donation of Constantine and Guicciardini's attack on Machiavelli's rather Stoic application of the repetition of analogous situations but also in a more general relativism that left its mark on Calvin's understanding of church history and on his exegetical methods. He saw the rise of episcopacy, for example, as a practical response to the problem of dissension in the early church, an "arrangement introduced by human agreement to meet the needs of the times"; and he noted that there are "many passages of Scripture whose meaning depends on their [historical] context."[197] For Calvin fallen man seems to confront God in history rather than in nature.

At the same time these tendencies in Augustinian humanism also suggest the repudiation of the Stoic vision of peace as the ideal toward which man naturally aspires. This too was an expression of the greater realism in the Augustinian tradition; it had no conflict in principle with the acceptance by Renaissance society of warfare as a normal activity of mankind.[198] Within the Renaissance republic conflict had been institutionalized by constitutional provisions for checks and balances among competing social interests;[199] the Stoic ideal, on the contrary, would have sought to eliminate conflict by submitting all interests to the adjudication of reason, settling for nothing less than final solutions to human problems. And the restlessness of human society was paralleled, in the vision of Augustinian humanism, by the inescapable restlessness of individual existence. The Augustinian conception of man as passion and will implied that he could only realize himself fully in activity, which inevitably meant that life must be fraught with conflict, an external struggle with other men, but also an inner struggle with destructive impulses in the self that can never be fully overcome. For Valla virtue was only ideally a goal; practically it was an arduous way.[200] And the Calvinist saint, unlike the Stoic sage, could by no means expect a life of repose; on the contrary he must prepare himself "for a hard, toilsome, and unquiet life, crammed with numerous and various calamities. . . . in this life we are to seek and hope for nothing but struggle."[201] The ideal of earthly peace, from Calvin's standpoint, was a diabolical stratagem in which the struggle with sin was left in abeyance and God's will went undone. Here too it was apparent that Stoicism tended to confuse earthly with heavenly things.


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Yet, far less equivocally than Stoic humanism, the vision of Augustinian humanism was social; and, based on the affective life of the whole man, its conception of social existence was animated not by abstract duty but by love. Augustinus reproved the anti-social sentiments of Franciscus by pointing out that life in society is not only the common lot of mankind but even the most blessed life on earth: "Those whom one counts most happy, and for whom numbers of others live their lives, bear witness by the constancy of their vigils and their toils that they themselves are living for others."[202] Salutati found in charity, understood in an Augustinian sense as a gift of divine grace, a way to reconcile—that there should have been a problem here testifies to the strength of the contrary Stoic impulse—his religious values with his love of Florence and his other attachments to the world. Love alone, he wrote, "fosters the family, expands the city, guards the kingdom, and preserves by its power this very creation of the entire world."[203] Thus Stoic withdrawal was countered by Augustinian engagement, which offered not the austere satisfactions of Stoic contemplation but the warmer and more practical consolations of a love applied to the needs of suffering mankind. Zwingli was writing in this tradition in describing the moral ends of education. "From early boyhood," he declared, "the young man ought to exercise himself only in righteousness, fidelity, and constancy: for with virtues such as these he may serve the Christian community, the common good, the state, and individuals. Only the weak are concerned to find a quiet life: the most like to God are those who study to be of profit to all even to their own hurt."[204] Calvin, who was explicit that man is by nature a social animal, saw in the limitations of individual knowledge a device by which God sought to insure human community. "God" he wrote, "has never so blessed his servants that they each possessed full and perfect knowledge of every part of their subject. It is clear that his purpose in so limiting our knowledge was first that we should be kept humble, and also that we should continue to have dealings with our fellows." Because of the needs of social existence he early rejected Stoic contempt for reputation; conscience was by itself an insufficient guide for human conduct, he argued, because, strictly a private and individual faculty, it was likely, operating in a social void, to cut man off from his neighbor. For Calvin the struggles of the Christian life were above all required by loving service to the human community.[205] Augustinian humanism sought to meet the crisis of community in the age of the Renaissance not by protecting the individual from destructive involvement with the social world but by full engagement, if possible out of love, in meeting its deepest and most desperate needs.


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