The following is an edited excerpt from James Hankins’ article “The Christian Humanism of the Renaissance and the Revival of Classical Latin,” in the 2025 issue of Meliora, the academic journal of Memoria College.
In my teaching and writing over many years about Renaissance humanism, I’ve discovered that the word “humanism” can be an obstacle to many students, especially Christian ones. Students with some awareness of modern humanism think of it as an anti-Christian movement, which makes them in turn suspicious of Renaissance humanism. Modern Humanist Associations boast, falsely, of their roots in Renaissance culture. Since the nineteenth century, the phenomenon of “humanism” has been widely understood as non-religious by definition or as a substitute for religion.
This understanding is correct as regards post-Enlightenment humanism. As Europeans and later American elites lost their belief in Christianity in the wake of the Enlightenment and the Darwinian revolution of the later nineteenth century, many people began to worry that the social order would come unglued without the Christian system of belief to hold it together.
Without religious sanctions some new source of moral suasion would be needed. How would modern societies, without established, dogmatic religions backed by the state, enforce their norms? What would replace incentives in the form of rewards and punishments in the afterlife? The various humanist movements of modern times tried to provide an answer to this burning question, beginning with Kant’s Religion Within the Limits of Reason (1792). Thus the modern humanist movement tries to base morality in the dignity of human nature itself, above all its rationality, cut off from its theological roots or, following Hume, on the presumption of natural sympathy among human beings. If we wish to be reasonable, if we want to be fully human, we must be moral. Often added to this toothless plea is some version of the old Stoic argument that virtue is its own reward and vice its own punishment.
The movement known in recent scholarship as “Renaissance humanism,” however, has little or nothing in common with modern humanisms of this kind. The fundamental difference between modern humanism and Renaissance humanism has long been accepted in modern scholarship, thanks, above all, to the work of Paul Oskar Kristeller, the great twentieth-century authority on Renaissance humanism. For Kristeller, Renaissance humanism was a literary, not a philosophical movement, and it was, furthermore, a movement populated almost entirely by believing Christians, not atheists, crypto-pagans, proto-secularists, or secret enemies of the Church. The chief concern of Renaissance humanists was promoting the humanities—the studia humanitatis—which according to Kristeller embraced the literary disciplines of grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry, and moral philosophy—the latter discipline being studied and written in a non-technical way, in the manner of Cicero and Seneca. These core disciplinary interests set humanist teachers apart from teachers of other disciplines of the later Middle Ages such as law, medicine, and theology.
Kristeller thus also denied that there was any genetic relationship between the humanism of the Renaissance and modern philosophical humanism. That such a continuity existed had been a theme of the Italian scholarly tradition, whose most distinguished twentieth-century representative was Eugenio Garin, as well as of the leading German historian of Renaissance philosophy, Ernst Cassirer. Both saw Italian humanists as forerunners of modern, post-Enlightenment humanisms. In Kristeller’s view it was vain to look for such connections, since to classify Italian humanism as a philosophy was a kind of category mistake. There were no overarching, unifying philosophical themes in Italian humanism. It was not a philosophical tradition like Platonism or Stoicism. It was not a “philosophy of man,” as was suggested by the title of a popular collection of Renaissance humanist texts. Insofar as the humanists made use of philosophy in their literary writings, they were eclectics, borrowing from the ancient philosophers they admired, yet eager to show the compatibility of ancient philosophy with Christian belief.
