Theological Origins of Modernity

74 chapter three
republican government that was not associated with a Lockean notion of
rights and with what they saw as a capitalist political economy read too
much into the earlier humanist tradition. Th ey thus overlooked the deep
connection of humanism and Christianity.
Christian humanism is typically associated with the northern humanism
and with Erasmus and Th omas More in particular. While they were
indisputably Christian, it would be a mistake to believe that the earlier
Italian humanists were not. Th e humanist vision of Christianity that developed
in Italy was radically at odds with medieval and scholastic Christianity
and had little in common with either the Protestant or Catholic
theology that developed in the struggles of the Reformation, but it was
unquestionably Christian in its intentions, and, as we shall see, it played an
important if oft en concealed role in the development of Christianity from
the seventeenth century onward. How then ought we to understand the
connection of humanism and Christianity?
Although humanists almost universally rejected scholasticism, they
were more equivocal about nominalism. Indeed, while they abandoned the
nominalistic method and language, they held surprisingly similar views
on a number of matters. Building on the earlier work of Ernst Cassirer,
scholars such as Jerrold Seigel and Charles Trinkaus have argued quite cogently
that the humanist enterprise was indebted to nominalism. 15 While
this is obvious in the case of Salutati and later thinkers such as Nicholas
of Cusa, it is less evident in the case of Petrarch, whose thought was
more or less contemporaneous with that of Ockham and his immediate
followers.
Untangling this connection is made diffi cult by the fact that scholasticism
was not nearly as strong and widespread in Italy as it was in northern
Europe in the thirteenth century. Indeed, scholasticism became prominent
in Italy at about the same time as humanism. 16 Th e Italian experience
of scholasticism was thus markedly diff erent from that of the rest of
Europe. 17 However, Trinkaus and others have demonstrated that Italians
were involved in the tense nominalist controversies of the early fourteenth
century. 18 Th ey also suggest that Petrarch, Salutati, Braccolini, Ficino, etc.
were responding to the philosophical and psychological dilemma that
arose in the great debate between the realist scholastics and their nominalist
opponents. 19 We know that Petrarch was cognizant of the terminological
arguments of the nominalists. 20 Moreover, while he was Italian by
birth and studied for a time in Bologna, he also spent a great deal of his
early life in Avignon and had contact with the scholastic community there.
Finally, he and Salutati both were close to many Augustinians such as