Thank you Edwin - this is what I am concerned with, Propaganda. When I was at a secular school as a child and teenager (and I was an atheist) we were feed these concepts of the corrupt Catholic church that we all needed to be freed from if we wanted to think freely.
Can you give me examples of the propaganda and the arguments that balance it?
Also what was happening in the 12th century that made it more revolutionary in the history of ideas than the later period? That’s when many of the ancient universities were founded isn’t it?
Well, the propaganda is, “people in the Middle Ages only thought about theology, and then the Renaissance happened. Suddenly people developed an interest in the ancient pagan world, which was an exuberant, this-worldly, life-affirming culture, and so they started becoming that way too. They asserted their individuality and thought for themselves, and this led to the Reformation.”
A bit of a caricature of what people say, perhaps, but you get something like this in a lot of textbooks and popular, generalist books.
The scholar who did most to lay the groundwork for the older view of the Renaissance (i.e., the most sophisticated version of the above narrative) was Jacob Burckhardt. To give him credit, Burckhardt recognized the “dark side” of the Renaissance. He saw the Renaissance as a time of rampant individualism in which people asserted their own wills and their power to shape the world around them, and thus gave birth to the modern world. Nietzsche was influenced by Burckhardt, though Nietzsche, unlike Burckhardt, admired the ruthless Renaissance “heroes” Burckhardt described.
The more recent counter-narrative, admittedly less exciting for anyone not a hardcore geek, is most associated with the work of Paul Oskar Kristeller. There may be a connection between the fact that Kristeller was a refugee from Nazism, given how easily the Burckhardtian view of the Renaissance could be twisted to support fascism. Kristeller argued that the key feature of Renaissance humanism wasn’t a radically new view of life of the human condition but a different approach to education. The differences between humanism and scholasticism were primarily disciplinary, like the differences between an English department and a philosophy department. Naturally there tended to be different ways of looking at life in the two disciplines, and there were often clashes between them, but fundamentally Renaissance humanism was a new understanding of two of the traditional disciplines of the trivium: grammar and rhetoric. Not only were these disciplines understood in new ways, but they were given much more importance. That’s where genuine differences in philosophy appear. Humanists were not interested in abstract argument so much as in shaping human behavior through language. But that implied a view of the human person in which emotions and will mattered more than they had in most medieval traditions. (Obviously there are more affinities here with the nominalist and Scotist traditions than with Thomism, and it’s no accident that these more volitional forms of scholasticism tended to dominate in the Renaissance.)
Of course, there’s more to the Renaissance than humanism (indeed, Kristeller highlighted that by narrowing the definition of humanism to a specific phenomenon rather than a broad ethos). And not everyone accepts Kristeller’s redefinition. But on the whole contemporary scholars draw much less of a sharp line between the Renaissance and the Middle Ages than people did a hundred years ago. James Overfield has shown that in Germany, at least, humanism and scholasticism could co-exist quite easily, and many of the conflicts that appear to be between humanism and scholasticism were really more complicated.
As for the 12th-century “Renaissance,” I was speaking specifically in terms of cultural rebirth and rediscovery of texts. That is to say, insofar as Europe had a cultural “dark ages,” they ended by the 12th century. And while new texts were discovered in the Renaissance (Tacitus, for instance), I don’t think any of them had the huge impact that Aristotle had in the 12th.
Edwin
