The Rise of Humanism
The Rise of Humanism
In the modern period, the term “humanism” has come to designate a worldview that denies the existence or relevance of God or is committed to a purely secular outlook. This is certainly not what the word meant at the time of the Renaissance. Most humanists of the period were religious and were concerned to purify and renew Christianity, rather than eliminate it. How would this process of regeneration take place? It would be by a return to the fountainheads of western thought. Just as mainstream humanism sought to return to ancient Rome and Athens as the fountainheads of western culture, so Christian humanists went back to the New Testament, which they regarded as the ultimate source and norm for Christian life and thought.
The humanist program was set out in the Latin slogan ad fontes (“back to the sources”), which set out the vision of returning to the wellspring and source of modern western culture in the ancient world, allowing its ideas and values to refresh and renew that culture. The classical period was to be both a resource and a norm for the Renaissance. In art and architecture, as in the written and spoken word, antiquity was seen as a cultural resource, which could be appropriated by the Renaissance. In the case of Christian humanism, believers would return directly to simplicities of the New Testament, bypassing the complex theological programs of the Middle Ages. But it would be the original Greek text of the New Testament, not the Vulgate Latin translation, widely used by medieval theologians.
One of the most significant theological developments associated with the rise of humanism is the increased questioning of the reliability of the Vulgate text. If this translation proved unreliable, in the light of an increased understanding of the Greek and Hebrew languages, and an increased recognition of studying the Bible in those original languages, what of the theological ideas that might be dependent on such faulty translations? We shall return to this point later in this chapter (pp. 123–7).
Having thus far concentrated on western Europe, we must now turn to consider some of the important developments that took place in eastern Europe during this period.