‘HUMANITAS RENATA’

Robin Sowerby

At the beginning of his 1944 article, Panofsky distinguishes two implied meanings in the use of the term Renaissance, In a wider sense, it denotes a rebirth of higher culture in general, presup- posing, of course, that higher culture had been dead, or nearly dead, in the preceding period. In a narrower sense it denotes a rebirth of classical Antiquity following a complete, or nearly complete, breakdown of clas- sical traditions.1 This chapter will address the narrower association of the Renaissance with the rebirth of classical Antiquity. This, after all, has always been central to ideas of the Renaissance. Much of what follows concerns a clutch of letters that Petrarch wrote to classical authors and what they tell us about the Italian revival associated with his name. As Panofsky’s discussion of the Renaissance includes a comparison of Italy with Northern Europe, which he sees as having persisted in a predomi- nantly medieval mindset, there will be a brief concluding reference to Erasmus as the pre-eminent representative of humanism in the North. Distinctions not made by Panofsky are also drawn between the reviv- als of Latin and of Greek. A useful perspective can be provided for this and every classical revival by alluding to the reaction of the early Church fathers to the pagan classics. First there is the testimony of Jerome in his famous let- ter in which he advises a young lady to abstain from reading classical literature. He begins with some fearsome questions: What communion hath light with darkness? What concord hath Christ with Belial? What has Horace to do with the Psalter, Virgil with the Gospels, and Cicero with Paul? Is not a brother made to stumble if he sees you sitting at table in an idol’s temple?2

1 Erwin Panofsky, ‘Renaissance and Renascences’, Kenyon Review 6 (1944): 201–36, here 202–3. 2 Jerome, Selected Letters, trans. F. A. Wright, 2 vols. (London, 1933), 22.29.7 ff. 68 robin sowerby

He then recounts his famous nightmare when he is called before the judgement seat. I was asked to state my condition and replied that I was a Christian. But He who presided said: ‘Thou liest: thou art a Ciceronian, not a Christian. “For where thy treasure is, there will thy heart be also.” Cicero is evoked as the standard bearer of cultural value not only by virtue of the style of his classical Latin, but also as a cultivated liberal man of letters and eminent moralist, if not philosopher, who actively engaged in affairs of state. Jerome’s famous nightmare is a rather extreme expression of the tensions wrought by the new religious dis- pensation among classically-educated intellectuals of the late Roman Empire. The nightmare occurs while he is on a journey, with obvious symbolism, from Rome to Jerusalem. If a modern reader is tempted to see irony in this letter, it is clear that no one in the Renaissance read it ironically. By contrast, there is the testimony of Augustine that he had been led to Christianity by a reading of Cicero’s Hortensius, a work (now lost) which inspired him to seek truth wherever it may be found and not in any one school of thought or philosophical system. This prepared the way for all those arguments that reading the classics could be a preparation for the greater Christian revelation to come. Despite this, he is nevertheless uneasy about his love for Cicero. So I made up my mind to examine the Holy Scriptures and see what kind of books they were. I discovered something that was at once beyond the understanding of the proud and hidden from the eyes of children. Its gait was humble, but the heights it reached were sublime. . . . But these were not the feelings I had when I first read the Scriptures. To me they seemed quite unworthy of comparison with the stately prose of Cicero, because I had too much conceit to accept their simplicity and not enough insight to penetrate their depths.3 It was always something of a problem for educated Christians that the Gospels, written in demotic Greek, did not emanate from high culture and that the language of the Old Testament and, indeed, of Jerome’s Bible, when it came, was hardly written in a style approximating to Ciceronian prose.

3 Augustine, Confessions, English and Latin, trans. William Watts, 2 vols. (London, 1912), 3.4–5.