Theological Origins of Modernity

78 chapter three
humanism was certainly never the choice of a majority of Christians, but
it was infl uential especially among the intellectuals and generally accepted
as orthodox.
Central to the humanist enterprise was the defense of a notion of human
dignity. 31 In order to defend such a notion, it was necessary for humanism
to emphasize the fact that man was created in the image of God and to
minimize the eff ects of the Fall and original sin. Th ese points were crucial
for most humanists but also problematic. Th ey understood that without a
liberal reading of both matters, they would have to conclude that the great
moral heroes of antiquity, Socrates, Cicero, and Cato, had been damned.
Dante had sought to fi nesse this problem by putting Socrates in limbo, but
this was insuffi cient for most humanists who needed to believe that morality
and piety were more or less identical. If men such as Socrates had been
damned, it would be hard to avoid the nominalist conclusion that God was
indiff erent or even unjust. However, if it was possible for such virtuous
men to be saved without knowing Christ, then it was hard to understand
why Christ and his sacrifi ce were necessary.
Humanists employed two diff erent strategies in their eff orts to resolve
this problem. Following Paul’s account in Romans that God’s laws were
revealed through the order of nature, they argued that pagans who had
led virtuous lives according to nature had thus recognized, honored, and
perhaps even “worshipped” God even though they did not know of Christ.
Th is was especially true for those pagans like Socrates and Cicero who
recognized that there was only one god. Th us, the virtuous pagans could
by only some slight stretch of the imagination be counted among the elect.
Th e problem with such a view was that it seemed to propel one toward
Pelagianism. Th e second possibility, which we will discuss below, was to
imagine that there was a common origin to both Christianity and pagan
thought. Such a common origin could justify the humanists’ belief that
the moral teachings of pagans were inspired by God and thus essentially
identical with the teaching of Christ.
Th e rapprochement of pagan and Christian thought was facilitated by
the work of Leonardo Bruni (1369–1444), who was a student of Salutati
and like him served as a papal secretary before returning to Florence in
1415 as his successor in the chancellorship. Among his many contributions,
Bruni greatly eased religious suspicions that the humanist reading of secular
texts corrupted piety by translating and publishing a letter from Basil,
one of the greatest Christian heroes, defending the reading of pagan poets
by Christian students. 32 He also popularized a new notion of history, originally
formulated by Flavio Biondo (1392–1463), that divided history not