by Matthew Gaetano

The Italian Renaissance tends to be overlooked in narratives of the history of theology. The leap from high and late medieval scholastics like Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, and Gabriel Biel to Martin Luther is common. Just a few years ago, even John O’Malley, after decades of effort to bring our attention to the importance of the Renaissance for understanding the history of theology and Western Christianity, recognized that this was still a problem:

Standard histories of theology move seamlessly from late-medieval Scholasticism to the Reformation. They do so because Luther’s theology developed in part as a reaction to Scholasticism. Once the histories have established that fact, they go on to show how, first, in reaction to Luther and the Reformation, Catholic theology developed a newly controversialist pattern and, second, how, independently of the Reformation, it also developed a renewed interest in the theology of Thomas Aquinas that ushered Scholasticism into a new phase in its development.

These histories invariably devote a few lines or a few paragraphs to Renaissance humanism, especially for its contribution to the historical-critical methods applied to the Bible, as pioneered by Lorenzo Valla (1404–57) and carried forward by others, especially Erasmus (1466–1536). They might even mention Erasmus’s famous clash with Luther over free will (1524–25), but that is generally the end of it.

They thus reduce to passing mention an important chapter in the history of Western religious thought. The humanists of the Renaissance did much more than lay the groundwork for textual criticism that the nineteenth and twentieth centuries further developed into a phenomenon with which we are so familiar today. They developed a full theological vision based on sources and methodological principles strikingly similar to the sources and principles that animated the theological vision of Vatican II.

In future posts, TRF will highlight some of the achievements of Renaissance theology. As O’Malley indicates, the interest of humanists like Valla and Erasmus in the original languages of Scripture and textual criticism have received much more attention than the “theological vision” found in the works of this era. Of course, whole books have been written on the theology of Petrarch, Marsilio Ficino, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, and Desiderius Erasmus (see the accounts unifying such achievements here and here), but O’Malley’s comments indicate that these works have not always penetrated common and even scholarly narratives of the era between Thomas Aquinas and the Reformation.

TRF remains committed to understanding the ancient roots and modern implications of Reformation debates about sin, salvation, the divine will, the sacraments, and the church. But it is noteworthy that major figures of the Italian Renaissance saw the threats to Christianity differently than those involved in the later Reformation polemics. Protestants were concerned, among other things, about self-righteous churchmen and theologians, about those who allowed the Pelagian heresy – the belief that one can merit salvation without divine grace – to creep back into Christendom. Their Catholic opponents feared that the proclamation of justification by faith alone would undermine devotion to the sacraments and the unity of the Church. The defenses of divine grace and the sacramental life central to the Reformation and Counter-Reformation – and so many other theological issues – remain important today, but figures like Marsilio Ficino (d. 1499) and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (d. 1494) worried about threats to religion itself. They saw philosophers in their own day as undermining fundamental beliefs such as the immortality of the soul and the providence of God.

Ficino, the Florentine priest famous for translating all of Plato into Latin and for speaking about the dawning of a golden age in Renaissance Florence, referred to his time as an “iron age” in his work On the Christian Religion (partially translated by Eric Parker, with slight adjustments below). The sources of this corruption were impious philosophers and ignorant priests. It is an “unhappy age” that severs the “divine link between wisdom and religion” that was found among ancient Jews and Christians:

For a great education has been taken from its place and transferred to the profane, from whom malicious things must now be taught rather than knowledge, resulting in a multitude of iniquity and a means to lasciviousness. Furthermore, the most precious pearls of religion are frequently dragged about by the ignorant and are trampled under foot by them, as if they were their own property. For it frequently appears under the name of “a superstitious, incompetent, ignorant, and lazy administration.” So little do [these administrators] understand the truth unmixed [with error] which shines upon the eyes of the pious as a deity and so wrongly do they worship God with what strength is in them that they govern the sacred office while being absolutely ignorant of both divine and human things. How long shall we prop up this wretched and unbending fortune of the iron age? Oh, people of our celestial homeland and citizens and inhabitants of earth, I beg you, if we can, then let us liberate philosophy, the sacred gift of God, from impiety whenever we can.

Furthermore, if we are willing, let us redeem our holy religion from this detestable ignorance for the sake of mankind. I exhort everyone and I entreat philosophers specifically, therefore, either to take up thoroughly [the subject of] religion or to touch upon it [in their writings]. Priests, however, [I exhort] to apply themselves diligently to the study of legitimate wisdom. How much I have accomplished or will have accomplished in this matter, I do not know. I have proved, nevertheless, and I shall not cease to prove that I have not confided in my own abilities but in the mercies of both God and men.

For Ficino, an age of iron is one characterized by the lack of unity between religion and learning, between piety and education.

The oppositions that Ficino saw as emerging in his own time seem to be quite characteristic of our own day, with cultural commentators often decrying moral therapeutic deism (with its lack of belief in divine providence), materialism, scientism, and widespread ignorance of our religious traditions. Could Christian ressourcement – a return to the sources – benefit from drawing upon these Renaissance figures alongside the Church Fathers, the medieval scholastics, and Reformation and Counter-Reformation theologians? These Renaissance theologians found a way to reforge the alliance with Platonism in defense of religion and divine providence, something that we will discuss in future posts. This Christian Platonic vision of the divine, the cosmos, the human being, and human action had a substantial influence on artists, poets, and some later theologians and philosophers. As modern Christians reflect more deeply on the role of beauty in the message of the churches (e.g., here, here, and here), the theological vision of the Italian Renaissance should be a fundamental resource.