Sword & Trowel 2017: Issue 1 


hard to defi ne the Renaissance, but even harder to ignore it. Beginning with the life and work of the Italian literary genius Francesco Petrarch in the latter half of the 14th


century, a


wind of change was blowing across Western European culture. Many Renaissance thinkers reacted against huge slices of medieval culture, call- ing for a return to a more ancient (and, they believed, healthier) type of culture found in classical Greece and Rome.


This style of thinking, and its re-


search into the historical sources of European culture, including its an- cient languages, was given the name humanism in the early 19th


century.


This was long before that word took on an anti-religious meaning, so we must not be alarmed when we hear about Renaissance humanism. Very few of the humanists of that time were anti-religious. Especially in northern Europe, they were devoutly Christian. The well-known Renaissance


humanist motto and war cry was ad fontes – back to the sources. This did not mean a slavish imitation of the ideals of ancient Greece and Rome, but much more what scholars today would call a ressourcement: seeking inspiration from the ancient sources of European culture, and applying them in new ways to the present. For some Renaissance humanists, especially in northern Europe, this came to include a critical rejection of much medieval theology and spiritu- ality, and a return for inspiration to the original sources of Christianity, namely the Bible itself and the early church fathers. The fathers of the fi rst four or fi ve centuries came to be seen as better interpreters of the Gospel than the medieval scholastic theologians.


This double movement of return to the Bible and to the fathers is most powerfully seen in the life and work of Erasmus of Rotterdam. We know of Erasmus’ scholarly devotion to the Greek New Testament, by which


A view of Florence, in many ways the capital city of the Italian Renaissance


page 22


Seeds of the Reformation


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