Theological Origins of Modernity

80 chapter three
or expression. Rather, drawing on Plato, humanism imagines the artist to
recreate the divinely beautiful essence of creation in all of its shapes and
forms, up to and including the depiction of God himself.
Valla saw this connection of art and religion quite clearly. Trinkaus
writes: “Th e world of religion, declares Valla, is invented and depicted by
man, not because it is not there, for the transcendent conviction of our
faith asserts that it is, but because we cannot know it except prophetically
and allegorically.” 35 God as an infi nite being cannot be captured in merely
fi nite forms except in an allegorical fashion. Th erefore, religion has to be
given form by the human will. However, religion does not diff er in this
respect from other forms of knowing. Th us, Trinkaus concludes that for
Valla, not “only the world of the divine but also the eternal world of nature
and man are continually being reinvented and redepicted by the active,
creative mind and imagination of man himself. Man operates in this fashion
because he has been created in the image and likeness of God, who is
thus invented and depicted by holy men themselves.” 36 Th is human power
in Valla’s view does not set man up against God but is actually an expression
of man’s own participation in divinity as the imago dei. Th e human
will thus operates within the will of God to shape the world, but it always
acts within a world that the divine will has already formed.
How these two wills can coexist, however, is puzzling. Valla was mystifi
ed by this question. In his work On the Free Will, for example, he admits
that humans cannot understand how free will can be compatible with divine
foreknowledge. While he was convinced that it was, he could only
speculate about how that could be the case, suggesting at times that God’s
will works through the human will (a notion that Luther later developed
much more explicitly), albeit in a completely mysterious way that seemed to
entangle him simultaneously in both Pelagianism and Manicheanism. 37
In assigning such a role to human will, Valla drew on the syncretistic
Neoplatonism of the later Roman Empire. 38 Petrarch and Salutati had already
turned to Plato in their attempts to lay out a theological position
independent of both scholasticism and nominalism. Th is turn was legitimated
in their minds by Augustine’s avowed Platonism. Th inkers of the
fourteenth and even the early fi ft eenth centuries, however, had only limited
access to the works of Plato and the Neoplatonists. Augustine himself
was known almost exclusively only from the selective extracts of his work
included in Peter Lombard’s Sentences, which gave a one-sided impression
of his thought. Th e recovery of Platonic and Neoplatonic thought was accelerated
by renewed contacts with Eastern Christianity at the Council of
Ferrara (1438–45), where for the fi rst time Italian humanists met a living