Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

RENAISSANCE AND SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY RATIONALISM 17
in holding these erroneous views, but he presented the greatest danger, Petrarch
believed, because he had the most authority and the greatest number of followers.
And while the pagan Aristotle could not be blamed for holding these errors, his
present-day acolytes had no excuse. 9
Despite their adulation of Aristotle, the scholastics failed, in Petrarch’s
opinion, to understand his thought. They disdained eloquence, treating it as ‘an
obstacle and a disgrace to philosophy’, whereas Aristotle had believed that it was
‘a mighty adornment’. 10 He blamed the inelegant style which characterized Latin
versions of Aristotle not on the author’s inattention to style but on the ignorance
of his medieval translators—a censure which was to be frequently repeated by
later humanists. 11 Yet aside from the ethical treatises, Petrarch’s acquaintance
with Aristotle’s writings was neither wide nor deep.
If Petrarch was ill-informed about ‘the Philosopher’, he was positively
ignorant about ‘the Commentator’, Averroes, probably never having read
anything at all by him. This did not stop him from criticizing the Arabic
interpreter even more strongly than he had done the Greek philosopher. 12 In
sharp contrast to the scholastics, who considered Arabic learning to be an
important part of their intellectual legacy, Petrarch and his humanist successors
restricted their philosophical interests almost exclusively to the Greco-Roman
past. Among the doctrines traditionally associated with Averroism was the
double truth, 13 which theologians such as Thomas Aquinas rejected, maintaining
that there was only one truth, the truth of faith, and that any philosophical
proposition which contradicted it was necessarily false. Petrarch shared this
point of view, arguing that since ‘knowledge of the true faith’ was ‘the highest,
most certain, and ultimately most beatifying of all knowledge’, those who
temporarily set it aside, wishing ‘to appear as philosophers rather than as
Christians’, were in reality ‘seeking the truth after having rejected the truth’. 14
According to him, scholastics were forced into this position not by an inevitable
conflict between philosophy and religion, but rather by their support for one
particular philosophy, Aristotelianism, which on certain crucial issues —the
eternity of the world and the immortality of the soul—denied the fundamental
truths of Christianity. The solution was therefore not to abandon philosophy per
se, but to adopt a different sort of philosophy, one which avoided these
theological errors.
That philosophy, for Petrarch, was Platonism. Plato, who offered convincing
rational arguments in support of both the immortality of the soul and the creation
of the world, had risen higher ‘in divine matters’ than other pagans. Because
Plato ‘came nearer than all the others’ to Christian truth, he, and not his student
Aristotle, deserved to be called ‘the prince of philosophy’. By promoting Plato as
a more theologically correct, and hence more profound, philosopher than
Aristotle, Petrarch was able to mount yet another challenge to the scholastic
philosophy of his day. 15 But for all his advocacy of Plato, Petrarch’s knowledge
of his works—like that of all Western scholars in this period—was very limited.
Of the four dialogues then available in Latin, he made extensive use only of the