Does the Renaissance Matter?

There are only a few epochs of revolutionary philosophical change in the standard presentation of the history of philosophy. One was where it all began: Athens in the late fifth and early fourth centuries with such luminaries as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Then there is the so-called Enlightenment, but if we pinpoint any time and place as we do the ancient world, it is generally Jena in the late 1790s and early 1800s where an eclectic group of poets, writers, and philosophers gathered together and formed the intellectual basis for Romanticism. Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel are common names, especially Hegel, all of whom influenced by the writings of the sage of Königsberg, Immanuel Kant, who serve as the basis for the revolutions in modern philosophy including existentialism, phenomenology, and, of course, Marxism. If there is a third turning point in the history of philosophy it is Renaissance; however, the guiding lights of the Renaissance were scattered about Europe across many centuries and even though many people may acknowledge the Renaissance as very important, they know next to nothing about it and have probably never read any of the Renaissance thinkers who have shaped our culture and modern world which owes much to the Renaissance so many centuries ago.

“Philosophy took an interesting turn in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which could not have been expected from the medieval, Scholastic point of view, and that is clearly distinct from important developments that occurred in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,” write Paul Blum and James G. Snyder in their introduction to Philosophy in the Renaissance: An Anthology. The story of Renaissance philosophy is only vaguely known despite its name being well-known. The writings of the ancient philosophers, lost to cobwebs of monasteries, lost to the original languages now forgotten by western Europe, lost to the theological speculations of the Scholastics, was “rediscovered” through a series of unforeseen events which spurred a renewed interest in the writings of Plato, Plotinus, Aristotle, Galen, and many others. This “rediscovery” sparked the rise of what we now call Humanism, an unclear catch-all term that has something to do with us as humans. And knowing only this little bit of the “interesting turn” in philosophy that happened between the Middle Ages and the Modern Age, students of philosophy then turn to reading Francis Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, and the early Enlightenment philosophers en route to get to Kant and the Jena Idealists and Romantics necessary for understanding nineteenth-century philosophy.

A few Renaissance thinkers are known to people. Machiavelli is probably the most famous if he is to be considered Renaissance instead of early modern. He wrote a book on politics called The Prince. Then maybe Montaigne too is a name some people have heard; he wrote a bunch of letters about life. And that’s about it. If people know Renaissance philosophers like Machiavelli and Montaigne, it’s generally only by name and not by their works.

Even though we in the western world have some vague notion that the Renaissance was an important age of intellectual, philosophical, theological, and scientific (re)discovery, most of us haven’t read the Renaissance writings. Thankfully, Philosophy in the Renaissance tries to correct this glaring hole in our intellectual education. The Renaissance matters, as we still sort of know, but since the Renaissance really does matter, we should also be reading the Renaissance thinkers and their writings and not just pay lip-service to when the term Renaissance is thrown around. “The Renaissance is obstinately peripheral to the most prominent narratives about the history of philosophy and its development, narratives that stress the importance of the philosophy in the periods immediately before and after the Renaissance.” I know this is true in my own philosophical education. As an undergraduate, there were courses in ancient and classical philosophy. There were courses in early modern philosophy. There was a glaring absence in Renaissance philosophy even though my professor of early modern philosophy would refer to the Renaissance, to Machiavelli and Montaigne, to the ideas of the Renaissance which proved influential upon the early moderns.

What are some of those ideas, the reader might now ask? “Renaissance philosophers focused on the potential for change, improvement, recuperating lost insights, and the joy of thinking for themselves and with one another.” Of course! Of course, we believe this. We are still the children of the Renaissance in this regard. Now, however, we should pick up and read those forefathers of ours that helped to give birth to the world we live and the ideas which still saturate it.

The selection of 22 thinkers in this anthology is a good, even if limited, overview of Renaissance thought. Included among them are the aforementioned Machiavelli and Montaigne. Thankfully, this volume includes the often-neglected Discourses on Florentine Matters after the Deaht of Lorenzo de’ Medici the Younger instead of selections of The Prince or Discourses on Livy since both of those works are widely and affordably available to contemporary readers. Montaigne’s essay “Of Experience” is included as well, a very apt selection given Montaigne’s citations of many authors of antiquity which reflects the newfound engagement with classical thinkers that defined much of Renaissance philosophy.

Among other thinkers included are Pico Mirandola, the famous Italian Humanist whose most famous work is the Oration on the Dignity of Man. A selection of Mirandola’s spiritual writings is part of this anthology, highlighting the spiritual and religious ingenuity and innovation of the Renaissance during an age of pluralistic engagement with other theological traditions and questioning whether those beliefs were compatible, in some way, with Christianity. That cross cultural and interreligious compatibilism was the spirit of the Oration and to include Mirandola’s other spiritual writings was an excellent choice as it relates to the modern infatuation with religious ecumenism and pluralism.

Another famous Italian Humanist is included, and he is perhaps the most famous philosopher most people have never heard of. Marsilio Ficino was a clerical scholar, the man who founded the Florentine Academy in a model after Plato’s Academy. Ficino, more than any other writer in western history, gave to our culture the Platonic Plato—admittedly, a Plato that was the construction of the Byzantine pagan philosopher Plethon and Ficino’s own attempts to synthesize a mystical and metaphysical Plato into Christianity and very far removed from the historical Plato. The real Plato was a political philosopher first and foremost. It was only after Plotinus and the Neoplatonic turn that Plato became a mystic and spiritual philosopher instead of the political thinker he was who had influenced Demosthenes and Cicero. Nevertheless, it was Ficino—not really Saint Augustine as commonly told—who baptized the remade Plato into the waters of Christian theology. Concepts of “Platonic love,” Plato’s God as essentially compatible with the Christian understanding of the biblical God, and the idea of the purification of the soul are all drawn from Ficino’s writings (not Augustine’s). “Marsilio Ficino,” writes James G. Snyder as he introduces him to readers, “is one of the most important and prolific advocates of Platonism in the Renaissance…His interpretation of Platonism was influential among philosophers for centuries on account of his treatises, translations, commentaries, and correspondence.”

The inclusion of Ficino is essential to this volume, and the Letters chosen to represent him here give the reader a good introductory understanding of his own project and reading. He cites and dialogues with many ancient philosophers as well as medieval Islamic philosophers too. Anaxagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Avicenna, and Al-Ghazali were all individuals Ficino knew in some form. Reading the three letters included in this volume, though brief, highlights the scope and totality of Ficino’s intellect.

The inclusion of Nicholas of Cusa and Philip Melanchthon are also notable. Alongside the selected writings of Mirandola and Ficino, one of the great gifts of this anthology is in rebuking the anti-Christian and anti-theological narrative of the Renaissance as some sort of “secular” and “rationalistic” era of proto-scientific discovery. It is true that the Renaissance thinkers are modern in ways that ancient thinkers were not: their beliefs in the transformation of nature, the self-making of our own identities, and an understanding of human nature principally as change and movement do stand against the more static and fixed conceptions of objectivity found in ancient and scholastic thought. However, God pervades the writings of most of the Renaissance thinkers. Heterodox or not, to ignore this obvious fact is to give a distorted and ultimately inaccurate representation of what the Renaissance was (as is sadly fashionable in all the presentations of it as some implicitly materialistic, scientific, and rationalistic movement which is simply a lie given the occult science and occult rationalism that was the true spirit of the “science” and “rationalism” of the age).

Another great feature of this book is the accompanying introductions to each thinker included. Expert scholars of the Renaissance offer concise introductions, setting the stage and context for readers as they prepare to read the selected writings. Philosophy in the Renaissance: An Anthology, is a wonderful and superb work that gathers the other famous writings of important men who shaped our culture. Any reader who would like to expose themselves to the Renaissance, understand the Renaissance and its importance to our world today, or just expand their knowledge of Renaissance thinkers, would do well to read this anthology.

Philosophy in the Renaissance: An Anthology
Edited by: Paul Richard Blum and James G. Snyder
Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2023; 392pp

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