Theological Origins of Modernity

humanism and the apotheosis of man 77
religious practices of their contemporaries were at best distorted images of
the genuine Christianity of Augustine and the other church fathers, and
they blamed this distortion on the scholastic reliance on the pagan Aristotle
and the Islamic Averroës. Th ey believed that the key to reawakening
genuine religiosity was to locate and root out those beliefs and practices
that their historical and linguistic scholarship increasingly revealed to be
later additions to Christianity. Th is reformatory impulse was strengthened
by the recovery of the works of Cicero, Seneca, and other Roman writers
as well as the dialogues of Plato and the works of the later Neoplatonists. 28
Th ese works gave them an increasingly accurate picture of the intellectual
environment within which Christianity fi rst developed and the ways in
which ancient moral and metaphysical teachings had informed Christian
belief and practice.
italian humanism
From the very beginning Italian humanism sought to reconcile Christian
piety and ancient virtue. Th e leading humanist of the generation aft er Petrarch
was Coluccio Salutati (1341–1406). As a young man, he was taught
by Moglio, a friend of Petrarch, and then served as a papal secretary. In
1368 he began a correspondence with Petrarch. He was recalled to Florence
in 1375 to serve as the chancellor (or Latin secretary) of the Florentine
republic and was one of the leading proponents of civic republicanism. Although
he was mostly involved in civic aff airs, he wrote two short treatises,
On Fate and Fortune and On Religion and Flight from the World. Strongly
infl uenced by Petrarch and by nominalism, he developed a concept of the
individual that laid great emphasis on the power of the will. He drew on
pagan models in formulating his idea of the individual and was attacked
by Dominicans such as Giovanni Dominici (1357–1419) for doing so, but
the notion of the dignity of the individual that he developed in On Fate
and Fortune, for example, was clearly rooted in the idea of the free will
he derived from Augustine. 29 He also condemned the Stoic belief that virtue
was the only good and that emotions were un-Christian and harmful.
He rejected Aristotelianism on essentially nominalist grounds, but he also
rejected the nominalist contention that God’s omnipotence made all human
freedom impossible. 30 It is not surprising then that opponents on both
sides of the realist/nominalist debate considered him anti-Christian, but it
would be a mistake to assume that their testimony was dispositive. In the
fourteenth and fi ft eenth centuries there was no single monolithic form of
Christianity, but various kinds of Christian belief and practice. Christian