Introduction

The study of Renaissance humanism persistently faces questions about humanism’s connections to later radical movements, such as Enlightenment deism, atheism, and especially ideas of modernity.Footnote ¹ A secularizing narrative, which characterizes Renaissance humanism as a rationalist, irreligious, modernizing movement, standing on the brink of modernity and linked somehow to modern notions of secular humanism, seems ineradicable.Footnote ² Many are the rebuttals to this narrative,Footnote ³ including the foundational studies by Paul Oskar Kristeller and Charles Trinkaus,Footnote ⁴ later chronologies that locate the birth of modern radical thought in the seventeenth century,Footnote ⁵ and cases for a pious Renaissance. The latter have labored to demonstrate that humanists read the church fathers as voraciously as pagan ancients and very frequently became clerics or entered monastic orders, and not just because the church was the institution best able to offer a secure and honorable livelihood.Footnote ⁶

While the secularizing narrative, and broader claims about a self-consciously irreligious or secularizing Renaissance, has been exaggerated, there is not nothing to the claim that the radical religious movements that took off powerfully in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had Renaissance roots.Footnote ⁷ Examinations of this question have often taken the form of debates over whether particular Renaissance individuals might have been secret atheists. Discussions have focused on figures who were labeled atheists by their contemporaries, such as Gemistius Pletho (1355–1454), Galeotto Marzio (1427–97), Pomponio Leto (1428–98), Pietro Pomponazzi (1462–1525), Machiavelli (1469–1527), and Giordano Bruno (1548–1600), but such discussions are complicated by the tendency of premodern authors to use the term atheism as a label for many divergent heterodoxies including theist ones.Footnote ⁸ Yet, even if such debates were soluble, two or twenty secret radicals are not, in my view, the best place to seek humanist contributions to later radical movements. Rather, I argue that the mainstream activities of pious humanists generated a new way of imagining the relationship between classical thought and Christianity, which—in the absence of any active desire to undermine theism or dismantle the church—created one of the tools that enabled later deism and similar radical movements.

My approach here is similar to that employed by Alan C. Kors in seeking the “orthodox sources” of unbelief.Footnote ⁹ Kors has demonstrated how Scholastics, taking the existence of God as a test case with a known correct answer, practiced the art of logic by debating on paper with fictitious mock atheists.Footnote ¹⁰ In such exercises, stout believers generated numerous antitheist arguments, which then became fuel for later radicalism. Lucien Febvre recommends a similar approach, observing that, since premodern radicals, especially atheists, were wary of persecution and therefore intentionally evasive about their beliefs in their own writings, it can be more fruitful to seek not radicals, but the intellectual apparatus necessary to support radical ideas. This apparatus includes related beliefs or tools of reasoning that accompany or enable doubt or new movements, what Febvre characterized as the “intellectual habitat” capable of supporting that rare and evasive beast, the early atheist.Footnote ¹¹

While Kors and Febvre concentrated on atheism, my examination will focus on the roots and habitat of deism, and of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century theist arguments against the necessity of revelation or organized religion. These movements required much the same intellectual habitat that fostered skepticism, libertinism, and atheism, but were more acceptable and widespread than such extreme radicalisms as atheism. My study has a recent parallel in the recent work of Ruben Buys, who has argued that fundamentally theist Dutch radicals of Spinoza’s circle owed much to rationalist techniques pioneered by ploddingly pious Reformation theologians of the sixteenth century, who would never had expected their defenses of the faith to have such consequences.Footnote ¹² My present attempt to expose the similarly inadvertent radical consequences of pious humanist activities draws upon a modest and uncontroversial body of sources: Renaissance biographies of classical philosophers.

Grand Claims in Modest Biographies

In 1558 the French jurist and humanist Jean de Coras (1515–72)—best known today for his account of the trial of Martin Guerre—wrote a short description of the life of the Stoic philosopher Epictetus (55–135 CE). Discussing Epictetus’s famous maxim “sustain and abstain,” De Coras wrote:

This deeply pious and apologetic account of Epictetus’s virtue and orthodoxy is typical of humanist efforts to defend the study of pagan authors in a Christian-dominated world, where their obsession with pre-Christian antiquity never stopped arousing suspicion. De Coras went on to write that Epictetus’s sect was the Cynic sect, founded by Antisthenes (445–365 BCE), the pupil of Socrates, and here the mismatch between De Coras’s antiquity and a modern understanding of antiquity becomes apparent. Scholars now label Epictetus a Stoic, not a Cynic, and this kind of conflation is one of the elements that makes Renaissance biographies of classical philosophers such rich sources for investigating the imagined antiquity that humanists aspired to imitate—an antiquity that differs greatly from today’s. To give another choice example, Girolamo Borgia (1475–1550) in his vita of Lucretius (ca. 1503) expanded Jerome’s four-word statement that Cicero edited (emendavit) the De Rerum Natura (On the nature of things)Footnote ¹⁴ into the claim that Lucretius went regularly to Cicero’s house, meeting there with Atticus, Brutus, Cassius, Memmius, and other Roman luminaries to get Cicero’s feedback on each round of freshly composed verses.Footnote ¹⁵ Such a composition critique group is very unlike anything suggested by ancient sources, but is exactly like what Girolamo Borgia himself did with his teacher Pontano (1426–1502), and what his humanist peers were doing in literary capitals around Italy. These biographies of ancient philosophers are projections—self-portraits—and expose much about how humanists saw themselves, their activities, and their mission.Footnote ¹⁶

Even more valuable for this study is that most of these biographies are not formal, independent works, like the lives of Seneca and Socrates by Gianozzo Manetti (1396–1459). Rather, they are short excerpts, usually paratexts written by editors to accompany translations, print editions, or digests of classical material. De Coras’s little biography, for example, was written to introduce a fictitious dialogue between Epictetus and the emperor Hadrian. Such short introductions are no scholar’s magnum opus but aimed to be enticing and uncontroversial, to open the doors of classrooms to new texts and curricula, and to please and appease censors and other authorities. In such paratexts, humanist authors were on their best behavior, so to speak, striving to present the ancients and the humanist project in the most persuasive, palatable manner possible. Authors often erase even their own authorship in these works, claiming that they are presenting nothing but the learned consensus, while hiding more controversial ideas in footnotes or appendixes, or confining them to their own original treatises.Footnote ¹⁷ When a humanist innovation such as syncretism appears in one of these paratexts—as when De Coras conflated Cynics with Stoics, and defined the Cynics as a sect focused on the study of the liberal arts, music, geometry, virtuous living, and teaching Plato’s doctrines on the immaterial soul—this syncretism is not the work of a firebrand outlier like Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–94).Footnote ¹⁸ Rather, De Coras’s intentionally uncontroversial paratext demonstrates the ambient syncretism present in the general worldview of a scholar who had a comparatively mainstream relationship with antiquity. When such syncretic moves, and other unexpected assumptions about antiquity, recur in many such minor introductory works, they provide a window on the antiquity humanists believed they were reconstructing.

Paratextual introductions to classics also had a different and substantially broader audience than ambitious humanist treatises such as Marsilio Ficino’s (1433–99) Theologia Platonica. Editions of ancients were printed and sold in great quantities, welcomed into the libraries of Scholastics, doctors, theologians, and statesmen, and used in many classrooms where few if any modern works were admitted. Thus the paratexts accompanying Seneca or Aristotle might be a first and powerful taste of humanism for a youth sent to university to study for a career in law, or for a young woman studying with a private tutor. Humanists’ ongoing campaign to defend the wholesomeness and profitability of the classics was so successful that, increasingly from the sixteenth century on, censors even judged classics more leniently than newer works, granting them an almost protected circulation.Footnote ¹⁹ Many of Erasmus’s (1466–1536) editions of classics circulated in regions where his own original works were banned, and where his very name was required to be expurgated from title pages. Yet his paratexts and the ideas within them—including the life of Seneca in his Opera Omnia—made it past the censors with only the author’s name excised. Similarly, in the seventeenth century, long after Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) was banned from publishing on politics or philosophy, his translations of Homer were permitted to circulate—translations that carried many Hobbesian concepts encapsulated within them.Footnote ²⁰ Hobbes and Erasmus are extreme examples, but many hundreds of lesser-known scholars published their own summaries of the goals of philosophy and the utility of the ancients in introductory vitae and other paratexts, without such paratexts engaging the attention of the gatekeepers of orthodoxy.

These ubiquitous and strategically moderate paratextual lives of ancients were also frequently reused in many editions, some long after the authors’ deaths, so their content outlasted intellectual vogues and individual reputations. In the seventeenth century, when new movements sparked by Francis Bacon and Descartes led many scholars to distance themselves from humanism, figures who would never have called themselves humanists, or sought out humanists’ works, still owned and studied humanist-edited editions of the classics and read the humanist voices contained in their paratexts. Thus, even as the direct influence of figures such as Ficino and Pomponio Leto diminished, the words that the fairly minor humanist Petrus Crinitus (1475–1507) had written about Lucretius in 1505 were still in the hands of young Montaigne (1533–92) as the century closed, and in the hands of the Baron d’Holbach (1723–89) two centuries later.Footnote ²¹

Even the language of these paratextual lives facilitated broad consumption. While early humanist vitae, like those produced by Pomponio Leto and his circle,Footnote ²² might be written in elaborate and ornamented prose designed to demonstrate their authors’ mastery of Latin style, later humanist-educated editors, writing for the increasingly competitive print market of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, preferred smooth, uncomplicated Latin paratexts, easily understood by students, and by nonspecialist scholars whose primary interests might be medicine, science, history, or theology rather than pure philology and high humanist style.Footnote ²³ Vernacular translations similarly presented humanist ideas in condensed form, and to much larger audiences. For all these reasons, paratexts in editions and translations of ancient authors—with their intentionally moderate and uncontroversial versions of the humanist cultural program—saturated European education in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and even eighteenth centuries to a degree that rivaled the most celebrated works of Petrarch (1304–74). These paratexts expose not only what humanists believed about antiquity, but the view of antiquity that they passed on most directly to the next generations.

The Utility of the Ancients

In attempting to argue that pagan philosophy was useful to Christians, humanist biographers and editors, and humanists in general, were responding to what John Marenbon has called the “problem of paganism.”Footnote ²⁴ Marenbon has demonstrated that Christian concerns over virtuous pagans—whether good pagans can be saved and whether their philosophy is useful to Christians—appeared as early as Paul’s letter to the Romans and the Acts of the Apostles, and then crystallized with Augustine (354–430).Footnote ²⁵ Augustine believed that his philosophical, and largely Neoplatonic, education had been essential in preparing him to understand Christianity, and praised Plato’s rejection of the senses and his focus on contemplation of the divine. Augustine also admitted many compatibilities between Christianity and the hybrid Stoic and Neoplatonic philosophy current in Rome of his era. In his De vera religione, Augustine explicitly suggested that, if Plato and other celebrated philosophers had returned to life after the coming of Christianity, they would have embraced the new faith, as many Platonists of Augustine’s day had done.Footnote ²⁶ He claimed too that pre-Christian philosophers would have recognized, in the attention Christianity gave to spiritual goods and eternal life, the very ideas that philosophers themselves had tried to teach in their esoteric works, but had not dared hope to see embraced by the public. Humanists from Petrarch on enthusiastically echoed Augustine’s claim that resurrected philosophers would be instant converts, and they used it to defend their beloved ancients. But Augustine coupled this statement with another, one very uncomfortable for humanists: that Christianity had surpassed philosophy and made it obsolete by turning the minds of all people toward the divine, whereas philosophy had only ever achieved this for a few members of tiny sects. Augustine also stated explicitly that religion and religious knowledge should not be sought in the works of philosophers because, despite their participation in public religious rites, in private philosophers held divergent and contrary opinions about the gods and the good.Footnote ²⁷

Augustine’s rejection of the utility of classical philosophy in De vera religione was a problem for classicizing humanists, especially because the problem of paganism became a subject of fresh and fierce debate during the High Middle Ages. As Marenbon has demonstrated, in the early Middle Ages pagan thought had been so comfortably integrated into Europe’s varied Christian communities that the problem of paganism was not actively debated.Footnote ²⁸ It was Peter Abelard (1079–1142) who revived the topic, both by endorsing the extensive use of Aristotle in theological circles, and by arguing overtly that Platonists and other pagans had worked out, through pure logic, a theology extremely similar to Christianity, including both monotheism and the Trinity. Abelard even claimed that many pagans might be in heaven, saved thanks to pre-Christian prophecies of the Incarnation. Albert the Great (1200–80), Thomas Aquinas (1225–74), and many others contributed to the debate revived by Abelard, which grew more heated in light of concerns over Averroism, and the frightening supposition that philosophical truths might be logically valid even if they contradict scripture. This controversy culminated in the condemnation of 1277, in which the first seven of the 219 propositions condemned by the church were affirmations of the usefulness and excellence of philosophy, especially of classical philosophy, while many other condemned propositions targeted the doctrines of particular pagan thinkers, especially Aristotle.Footnote ²⁹

Humanists’ primary asset in pushing back against this rejection of the usefulness of philosophy for Christians lay in another passage of Augustine. In his De civitate Dei contra paganos, Augustine stated that the lives of so-called virtuous pagans were not useful models for the moral education of Christians except in one way: if sinful Christians read about pagans who surpassed them in courage, temperance, and other virtues, the shame of being outdone by those who did not even have the advantages of grace and revelation might spur Christian readers to try to do better. James Hankins has called this rhetorical formula the quanto maius (by how much more) formula, and he has found it in the works of many Renaissance figures beginning with Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Salutati.Footnote ³⁰ The quanto maius formula appears frequently in humanist paratextual biographies of ancients, and its origin in Augustine offers at least one orthodox precedent for humanists to cite when pushing back against characterizations of classical philosophy as obsolete, useless, or dangerous.

Quanto maius is a rhetorical device rather than an argument, a fact that highlights a key difference between, on the one hand, the paratextual biographies that are my subject and, on the other, the arguments about the existence or nonexistence of God used by Kors in his parallel study. Unlike Scholastic debates with mock atheists, humanist lives of philosophers rarely contain formal logical arguments bearing on religion, or indeed on any topic. When biographies touch on larger issues, it is generally indirectly, through rhetorical moves: whether Plato and Paul are presented as equal or unequal authorities, whether a pre-Christian is characterized as virtuous for his fallen age or virtuous in an absolute sense, or whether the metaphorical light of reason is described as shining dimly or brightly on a particular author, place, or era. The contributions of rhetoric to intellectual change are, by nature, subtler than those of direct arguments, but not necessarily weaker. And since rhetoric often persuades without the audience realizing it, biographies that invoke, as rhetorical stage setting, particular images of the relationship between antiquity and religious truth can transmit the assumptions underlying those images without the reader being consciously aware that the topic is even under discussion. Thus, my study cannot, as those of Kors and Buys have, identify positive statements or logical techniques that appear in a radical Enlightenment source and also in a self-consciously pious work penned centuries before. What I can demonstrate is that certain common humanist rhetorical claims about antiquity imply, as logical necessities, radical theological positions, especially about revelation, commonly associated with the Enlightenment. Someone who read these humanist sources, and imbibed these rhetorical claims, could derive from them radical positive claims about religion, which humanists never overtly made or necessarily recognized as consequences of their rhetoric, but which they nonetheless transmitted to their readers.

The Monastic Pythagoras

Quanto maius is one of several rhetorical strategies that recur in humanists’ apologetic lives of ancient thinkers. While lives of Epictetus will receive the most attention in this study—since the extraordinary popularity of Stoic ethics made humanists bolder in their discussions of Epictetus than in those of more controversial ancients—a review of six humanist treatments of Pythagoras (ca. 570–ca. 495 BCE), composed from 1449 to 1598, will demonstrate several other standard Christianizing strategies employed by humanists, and how these evolved from the fifteenth century to the end of the sixteenth.Footnote ³¹

Raffaele Maffei Volteranno (1451–1522), writing at the midpoint of this tradition, provides a tidy example in the 250-word entry on Pythagoras that he wrote for his encyclopedic Commentarii Rerum Urbanarum (Commentaries on urban[e] things, 1506). In it Maffei claimed that Pythagoras’s famous philosophical travels—described by Diogenes Laertius and other ancient sources—were ordained by the stars.Footnote ³² He described Pythagoras lecturing to the public about frugality, temperance, chastity, and modesty, and added that Pythagoras founded a community of three hundred acolytes, bound by sacred oath to follow his rules for a life of study and rigorous self-discipline, separated from the broader community. This strongly hagiographic characterization, especially of the Pythagorean school, might be applied to such monastic founders as Saint Francis of Assisi. Maffei added that public suspicion incited a mob to attack the school, resulting in the martyr-like death by fire of many of the acolytes, and Pythagoras’s unhappy death in exile.Footnote ³³ Maffei’s choice to include these grim events in his account might reflect his own experiences of the sufferings that so often dogged scholar-sages in his own day, including himself, since Maffei had personally barely survived the mobs after the Pazzi conspiracy, had witnessed the persecution of Pomponio Leto (1428–98) and his circle, and had observed the unfortunate fates of Pico and Savonarola (1452–98) at the hands of religious authorities.Footnote ³⁴ Savonarola in particular is invoked by Maffei’s description of how Pythagoras encouraged women to sacrifice their luxurious ornaments at the temple of Juno as an act of piety.Footnote ³⁵ Clearly Pythagoras as monastic scholar-priest held far more traction in Maffei’s imagination than many other details available in the classical sources from which he worked.

While some apologetic strategies—such as stressing Pythagoras’s personal rejection of luxury—are common to all six humanist accounts of his life, other rhetorical claims grew more inflated, step by step, over time. The earliest humanist treatment of Pythagoras is Giovanni Aurispa’s (1376–1459) dedicatory letter to Pope Nicholas V, in his 1449 translation of Hierocles’s commentary In Aureos Versus Pithagorae Opusculum (Short work on the golden verses of Pythagoras). In it, Aurispa stressed the extraordinary “usefulness to the reader” of Pythagorean thought, which “hardly differs from Christianity,” a characterization that does admit some pagan error, but attempts to minimize it.Footnote ³⁶ Aurispa also compared the restoration of Pythagoras’s tattered works to his patron Pope Nicholas’s efforts to repair ancient Rome’s architectural relics. Aurispa’s contemporary Francesco Filelfo (1398–1481), in his 1464 Epistula de Opinionibus Philosophorum, described Pythagoras’s pilgrimages to study with the mystics of Egypt and with Zoroaster in Chaldea, hailing Pythagoras as the founder of Italic philosophy.Footnote ³⁷ Filelfo also claimed that while Plato learned political and civic matters from Socrates and details of the sensory world from Heraclitus, Pythagoras was Plato’s source in matters of reason and the divine.Footnote ³⁸ Between them, these two fifteenth-century accounts present Pythagoras as a virtuous sage, connected to divine knowledge and the invaluable Plato, but, unlike Maffei’s account written forty years later, they do not yet credit Pythagoras with saintly activities or apply hagiographic tropes.

In the forty years between these early accounts and Maffei’s, narratives of ancient theology, and Pythagoras’s place in them, were transformed by Marsilio Ficino, who included Pythagoras in his chronology of ancient sages.Footnote ³⁹ Developing a narrative that might be called the philosophical revelation or gentile revelation narrative, Ficino posited that, in the pre-Christian world, religious wisdom was transmitted in two parallel strands: Jewish revelation in the Old Testament and the divinely inspired philosophical writings of ancient sages.Footnote ⁴⁰ These two strands together, according to Ficino, prepared humanity, and specifically the Roman world, for the dawn of Christianity. Using the suggestion from Saint Ambrose that Pythagoras had a Jewish father,Footnote ⁴¹ Ficino suggested that divine philosophical knowledge had passed through a series of sages, from Moses, to Hermes Trismegistus, then Orpheus, Aglaophamus, and others, thence to Pythagoras, from him to Philolaus, then Plato, Plotinus, and finally the church fathers.Footnote ⁴²

In addition to leaving its mark in the form of portraits of pagan sibyls alongside Hebrew prophets on the Sistine Chapel ceiling and the floor of the Siena cathedral, Ficino’s idea of a separate philosophical revelation, and its accompanying intellectual genealogy of sages, was adapted by later scholars of Pythagoreanism, including the renowned German Hebraist and friend of Pico and Ficino, Johannes Reuchlin (1455–1522). Reuchlin’s 1517 De Arte Cabalistica mixes Pythagoreanism, Kabbalah, and other neoclassical mysticisms, and begins with an account of the life of Pythagoras. Maffei, writing soon after Ficino’s death, had presented a more explicitly saintly Pythagoras than Aurispa and Filelfo, but without explicit reference to Ficino’s theories. In contrast, Reuchlin included a version of Ficino’s intellectual genealogy of sages, along with descriptions of Pythagoras’s virtue and willful poverty, his philosophical pilgrimages, the importance of the school he founded, and his superiority to other classical sages who lacked access to Hebrew wisdom.Footnote ⁴³ In the De Arte Cabalistica Reuchlin attributed to Pythagoras, not only Jewish and quasi-Christian beliefs, but also Neoplatonic ones, including belief in metaphysical dualism, Platonic forms, and hypostatic degrees of reality. Reuchlin also credited Pythagoras and his disciples with miraculous powers, such as raising the dead, the details of which exist in classical sources but which earlier humanist biographers had chosen to omit. Reuchlin claimed that Pythagoras believed in a fundamentally Christian afterlife, and that he even foresaw the resurrection and Judgment Day, but that when Pythagoras had tried to explain these unfamiliar concepts to pre-Christian peoples, they were imperfectly understood and written down in garbled form, resulting in accounts of reincarnation and other heresies that were not Pythagorean beliefs but failed attempts to describe Pythagoras’s proto-Christian understanding of the soul’s immortality and return.Footnote ⁴⁴ Ficino had made the same claims about Plato, when defending him against charges of endorsing reincarnation.Footnote ⁴⁵

The influence of Ficino’s philosophical revelation narrative diffused far beyond personal friends like Reuchlin.Footnote ⁴⁶ Jumping forward another forty years, the dedication of the 1559 Basel edition of the Golden Verses, titled En Lector, Librum Damus Vere Aureum (Behold reader, we present the truly golden book), describes another divinely ordained series of pagan sages like Ficino’s, this time flowing forward from Solomon to Pythagoras. The volume’s editor Michael Neander (1525–95) duplicated elements of Maffei’s life of Pythagoras, but doubled its length, omitting Maffei’s accounts of the mob and quasi-martyrdom, while adding additional details about the rules of the supposed Pythagorean order.Footnote ⁴⁷ Neander expanded Maffei’s statement that Pythagoras undertook pilgrimage-like philosophical travels into the claim that Pythagoras founded a tradition of philosophical pilgrimage, later imitated by Plato, Cicero, Jerome, Galen, and other wholesome authorities. Forty years after Neander, in the dedication of the 1598 editio princeps of Iamblichus’s life of Pythagoras, produced in Holland, the Dutch classics professor Johannes Arcerius Theodoretus (1538–1604) presented yet another intellectual genealogy of sages, stating, like Ficino and Reuchlin, that Pythagoras and, through him, Plato were students of Moses. Thus, according to Arcerius, “those of the Socratic School, or almost, as we shall soon call it, the Mosaic school, have learned about God, and truly about virtues and vices, by the leadership of better nature, without God or the help of Scripture, and similarly have left behind helpful examples, which we can use to our advantage in common life, and above all in the administration of states.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Arcerius further claimed that Clement of Alexandria and other church fathers had fully embraced Pythagoras as part of the Christian tradition.

The boldness of the rhetorical claims made in these six lives increases step by step over time. Each author wanted to highlight Pythagoras’s Christian attributes, so they reinterpreted earlier accounts in more emphatically Christian terms, adding increasing levels of distortion, like a game of telephone. Aurispa in 1449, working from ancient sources, could say no more than that Pythagoras “hardly differs from Christianity.” Similarly, the highest praise Filelfo could muster was that Pythagoras was Plato’s theological source, a good connection since Augustine in turn used Plato. Ficino, who had read Filelfo, went further, claiming that Plato’s debt to Pythagoras evidenced a second revelation parallel to Moses’s, divinely ordained and essential to church fathers. Maffei in 1506 knew these accounts when he described Pythagoras as marked by the stars like Saint Dominic, a paragon of poverty and chastity like Saint Francis, and a persecuted champion of public moral reform like Savonarola. In 1517, Reuchlin, using Ficino, went further: Pythagoras was indeed the missing link between Moses, Plato, and Christianity; he did not “differ” from Christianity even slightly, as Aurispa had said, rather reincarnation and other apparent deviations were garbled accounts of Pythagorean prophecies of not-yet-revealed Christian mysteries. Forty years later, Neander took literally Maffei’s oblique suggestion that Pythagoras’s school had a quasi-monastic rule, and expanded on that rule, adding speculative details to what he did not realize was itself a speculative detail. Thus, when Arcerius introduced his edition of Iamblichus in 1598, multiple layers of Christianization filtered his reading of the sources thus: first, Iamblichus and Diogenes Laertius described Pythagoras’s travels; second, Filelfo made these travels sound like pilgrimage; third, Maffei claimed these pilgrimages were divinely ordained; fourth, Neander added that these divinely ordained pilgrimages inspired later pilgrims like Saint Jerome; fifth, Arcerius could claim that church fathers like Jerome had embraced Pythagoras as a divinely inspired contributor to the Christian tradition. Each step was small enough that a biographer could see himself as simply highlighting Christian elements present in earlier accounts, but the rhetorical inflation built up over time to imply a new relationship between antiquity and Christianity.

One perennial justification for assigning Pythagoras quasi-Christian status—also common in lives of other ancients—was his personal virtue. That many of the specific virtues humanists attributed to Pythagoras are extrapolated or invented rather than mentioned in any ancient source was no impediment. In the period, virtue of character was often considered to be proved by the beauty and wisdom of an author’s works. Cicero had argued that only a virtuous orator could be persuasive,Footnote ⁴⁹ and both Thomas Aquinas and Plato had said that truth, beauty, knowledge, and virtue have the same good and divine source. Petrarch, addressing the charge that he was a bad Christian for loving the un-Christian Cicero, had argued, “Cicero said much on the art of words, the virtues, and human wisdom, all true and therefore doubtlessly pleasing to the God of truth. For, since God is living truth, and since, as father Augustine says, ‘every truth is true because it derives from the truth,’ then any truth that one utters derives beyond doubt from God.”Footnote ⁵⁰ By this logic, even pagan authors, to the extent that they were wise and eloquent, were automatically of good moral character and their ideas in alignment with Christianity, which was, de facto, truth. Thus, Neander could claim in his introduction to Pythagoras’s Golden Verses that “Each of the poems, and the teachings of each of the two authors, Pythagoras and Phocylides, contain golden things, that is holy, pure and complete things, but succinct, well-rounded and short: these are the characteristics of wise men’s sayings about piety, the honest direction of studies, morals, and, in the end, all of life.”Footnote ⁵¹

Virtues Strategic and Sincere

The focus on virtue in these lives is no surprise, since humanist biographies were self-consciously didactic. Instilling virtue was humanism’s most consistent goal, a program to bring about a new golden age through the moral transformation of Europe’s educated classes, perhaps best expressed by James Hankins’s term “virtue politics.”Footnote ⁵² Humanists hoped readers, pupils, and Europe’s leaders would imbibe—through ancient writings and their own—the virtues that had produced Cicero, Seneca, and the Pax Romana. This shared didactic aim was especially present in biographies, since Renaissance authors saw biography as a fundamentally ethical genre, which taught good morals through examples of virtue and, when necessary, vice.Footnote ⁵³ Thus, biographies have a certain homogeny as sources, and humanist biographies of princes or soldiers are just as saturated with virtues as those of philosophers. I consider this homogeny an asset rather than a weakness, since it means that biographies contain a concentrated and particularly visible form of the didactic focus on virtue that was, in its way, even more definitive of humanism than the reuse of antiquity. Scholastics, Protestant Reformers, and even Enlightenment radicals used antiquity, but not for the sake of virtue politics, as humanists did. The rhetorical strategies that humanists used to shoehorn Christian virtue into everything from astronomy to pornography exposes humanists’ shared program, and the tactics and assumptions they relied on to advance that program. The strategies they used in lives of ancient philosophers specifically demonstrate how these tactics and assumptions affected the portraits of antiquity and knowledge that humanists passed on to subsequent intellectual movements.

The humanist assumption that wisdom and eloquence proved orthodoxy, based on Cicero and Aquinas, was easily applied to figures like Pythagoras and Plato, who were understood to have many doctrines compatible with Christianity. But it was also applied to more controversial figures. Apuleius (124–70 CE) posed a challenge because of his strong associations with mystery cults, yet even pagan priesthood is transformed into evidence of quasi-Christian piety in a 1621 edition, whose title Apulei Madaurensis Platonici Opera Omnia stresses Apuleius’s connections to Platonism.Footnote ⁵⁴ According to the life:

This portrait transforms Apuleius’s participation in mystery cults into the serial religious explorations of a man so wise that he sensed there must be some true religion hidden among the false ones. It even invokes a tragic parallel between Apuleius and Augustine, who similarly explored various cults—Manichean, Skeptical, Platonic—in his vain and voluptuous youth. If Augustine found what Apuleius did not, it feels as if mere accident of birth separated saint from philosopher, since both searched for the truth their intellects perceived beyond the pagan shadows.

The infamous Lucretius—denier of the afterlife, prayer, and Providence—was also not beyond the power of humanist Christianization. Lives of Lucretius, like that written by Giovanni Battista Pius (d. ca. 1540) for his 1511 edition of Lucretius, excused the poet’s un-Christian “errors” about atoms and the mortality of the soul as the confused poetic madness of a divinely inspired vates (poet-prophet) whose philosophy was too lofty to be communicated in imperfect language.Footnote ⁵⁶ This parallels Reuchlin’s and Ficino’s claims that Pythagorean or Platonic orthodoxies were garbled to produce reports of reincarnation. Epicurean asceticism and monk-like modesty in diet were stressed in all Lucretius’s Renaissance vitae.Footnote ⁵⁷ In 1570 his most influential editor, the Parisian Aristotelian Denys Lambin (1519–72), made Lucretius into a good Aristotelian, claiming that all the un-Christian errors in his work are summaries of Epicurus, not Lucretius’s own beliefs, which focused on wholesome Roman virtues.Footnote ⁵⁸ But it is not in the lives of infamous radicals like Lucretius—whose editors knew they had to tread carefully—that the phenomenon I am attempting to describe is most visible. It is in the lives of the figures humanists considered safe.

The Divine Epictetus

Thus I return to Epictetus, whom Jean de Coras in 1558 called “divinely Christian and Christianly divine,” and who communicated, in a two-word maxim, what the prophets and Saint Paul struggled to get across in lengthy scriptures.Footnote ⁵⁹ De Coras deployed the quanto maius formula full force in his introduction, proclaiming that Epictetus’s tranquil, forgiving followers lived more like Christians than the vengeful and quarrelsome Christians of his war-torn age.Footnote ⁶⁰

Stoic virtue sold a lot of books in the Renaissance. The first Latin translation of the Enchiridion by Angelo Poliziano (1454–94) was printed forty times between 1497 and 1750, joined by numerous other translations, editions of the original Greek, and editions of the commentaries by Simplicius and Arrian.Footnote ⁶¹ The digest’s brevity was one of its main selling points. As translator John Healey (d. 1610) said in his 1610 English edition, “It filles not the hand with leaves, but files ‘y head with lessons: nor would bee held in hand, but had by hart.”Footnote ⁶²

In such editions, biographical material often appears in the dedication as well as the vita. Ancient references and known facts of the author’s life usually comprise less than half of the biographical content, while the remainder is praise of the thinker’s virtuous character. In the case of Epictetus, biographies tend to put foremost his low social status and physical disability, lending authenticity to his advice about patient suffering and juxtaposing his bodily weakness with his strong and lofty soul, as in this 1567 quatrain: “Of servile kinde I borne was, / hight Epictete by name, / in substance pore, to God a friend, / and eke in body lame.”Footnote ⁶³

Printers often reproduced biographies from rival editions, rarely crediting the source, so in Epictetus’s case many editions contain a standard 200-word Latin vita. This vita states that Epictetus “was, in Rome, the slave of Epaphroditus, a certain intimate of Nero. He was a man of most holy and untainted life, wholly devoid of every haughtiness and arrogance, vices which troubled almost all other philosophers.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Next follows Lucian’s anecdote that someone paid 3,000 drachmas for Epictetus’s clay lamp,Footnote ⁶⁵ a tale that gave different translators the opportunity to localize the story by substituting familiar currency: 50 pounds sterling in Healey’s English translation, or 600 French livres in De Coras’s French.Footnote ⁶⁶ The standard vita ends with the statements that “[Epictetus] said that the sum of all philosophy was contained in two words, ‘sustain and abstain.’ During Domitian’s rule, either offended by his tyranny, or forced by a decree of the Senate expelling philosophers from the city, he moved to Hierapolis from Rome. After lingering briefly there, he is said to have lived in Rome until the time of Marcus Antoninus.”Footnote ⁶⁷

This was the common, unembellished version of Epictetus’s life. Elaborations frequently involved linking Epictetus to other ancients, often syncretically. In 1558 Jean de Coras claimed that Epictetus and his Cynics taught Plato’s doctrines on the soul. By 1600, the dedication to a reprint of Poliziano’s Latin text could boast, “It is agreed by everyone, and very well established even among those of mediocre learning, that the philosopher Epictetus strove after the pure and most true philosophy of Plato, and transmitted that part of it which pertains to the cultivation of morals and the ordering of an upright and pious life, a part which indeed is reckoned by all to be a supremely useful and necessary part of human life.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Other editions appended more anecdotes, usually focused on Epictetus’s moral character. In 1563 translator James Sedford added,

Epictetus’s willful poverty, humility, and saintly patience were recurrent take-home messages, his life a model of how to weather suffering.

Whether summarizing Epictetus’s ideas or advertising the utility of his handbook, these editors never discussed Stoic ontology, epistemology, or natural philosophy, and discussed Providence without reference to any of Stoicism’s distinctly un-Christian justifications for it. This is typical of Renaissance presentations of Stoicism. Seneca—whose works in Latin circulated more broadly and earlier than Epictetus’s in Greek—had been recommended by Petrarch as “an incomparable teacher of moral philosophy,” who singlehandedly made the Romans superior to the Greeks in moral arts.Footnote ⁷¹ Helped by Petrarch’s recommendation,Footnote ⁷² Seneca out-circulated all other ancients except Cicero, Virgil, and Aristotle, to the degree that, at the turn of the fifteenth century, the University of Piacenza had a professor of philosophy and a separate professor of Seneca.Footnote ⁷³ Yet, the Senecan works that enjoyed the greatest early circulation were not Seneca at all, but spuria that focused even more narrowly on moral philosophy: the spurious letters between Seneca and Saint Paul; the treatise De Quattuor Virtutibus Cardinalibus (On the four cardinal virtues), which is actually the work of Saint Martin of Braga (ca. 520–80); and the maxim collections De Moribus (On morals) and Proverbia (or Sententiae).Footnote ⁷⁴ Erasmus, in the life of Seneca that he wrote for the edition of Opera Omnia that he personally edited, wrote:

Seneca’s opinions on fields beyond moral philosophy were minimized in Erasmus’s edition, and completely absent from his vita.

This focus on ethics persisted in treatments of Epictetus. Jean de Coras—sharing Erasmus’s division of philosophy into three branches—claimed that Epictetus and his sect “hated rational philosophy and natural philosophy, and interested themselves only in moral philosophy.”Footnote ⁷⁶ A 1583 vernacular Italian edition of Epictetus with Simplicius’s commentary offers a rare counterexample; its dedication advertises an uncommonly broad selection of topics:

Yet even in this version—published for a broad vernacular audience, and in the last years of the sixteenth century, when interest in non-Aristotelian natural philosophy was on the rise—ethics still took first place. The volume appeared under the title Arte di Correger la Vita Humana, Scritta da Epitteto Filosofo Stoico (The art of correcting human life, written by Epictetus the Stoic philosopher). The editor’s opening address asks whether “among the many supremely useful lessons of the wise ancients, which are found written on this subject, is there any, as I judge it, so beneficial to human life, or so similar to our Christian religion, as that of Epictetus?,”Footnote ⁷⁸ adding that the Enchiridion, “using human reason, persuades people of many things which we are divinely commanded, the sum of which are, to obey God and nature, to do good to all as far as possible and harm none, to tolerate injuries done by others… . That happiness is found in a self-examined and tranquil soul. And finally that from the divine administration of human affairs comes justice, wisdom, and our salvation” and other familiar virtuous sentiments.Footnote ⁷⁹ Even when marketing the book to an audience with interests in astrology and the order of nature, the editor still characterized Epictetus, like Seneca, as valuable above all for the fact that he lived like a Christian, and could teach others how to live like Christians.

John Healey, in his edition, celebrated Epictetus’s quasi-Christianity by invoking Augustine, and used the image, popularized by Aquinas, of philosophy as a loyal handmaid to theology (ancilla theologiae).Footnote ⁸⁰ Healey wrote, “This Manuall of Epictetus, though not Saint Augustines Enchiridion, now by hap is the hand, or rather the hand-maide of a greater body of Saint Augustines: and hath beene held by some the hand to Phylosophy, the instrument of instruments… . In all languages, ages, by all persons high prized, imbraced, yay imbosomed.”Footnote ⁸¹ Healey crowned this eulogy with a pun on “stock fish”—i.e., salted cod—writing, “He is more senceles than a stocke, that hath no good sense of this Stoick.”Footnote ⁸²

While Healey joked about the foolishness of those whom Stoics cannot move to virtue, other editors approached the issue more gravely. A 1642 Latin edition published in Cologne includes a particularly ferocious articulation of the quanto maius formula: “This little book has such a religious spirit, and such hidden wisdom; that you may think it written by a supremely pious man. This little book by the excellence of its divine sentiments makes many Christians blush for shame, who have written morally filthy things, and never lived piously. Doubtless it must stir shame that Christian people, formed in this full noon of truth, do not see that thing whose light reached through to primitive people in the midst of pagan night. Thus, in our blindness, we are most in need of that thing, which those blind people understood.”Footnote ⁸³ A 1640 edition from Lyons focuses even more on the contrast between Christian hypocrisy and Epictetus’s Stoic authenticity, proclaiming: “I will not be Christian unless I live as a Christian, even if I have memorized all Christ’s words and commands to the last detail, and preach them to others… . What Christ gave to his disciples, the Stoic prescribed to his… . What Christ gave, the Stoic required.”Footnote ⁸⁴

So successful was this Christianizing campaign that, straying forward to the early eighteenth century, a 1704 volume claims that Epictetus might actually have been Christian. This very long French life of Epictetus by Gilles Boileau (1631–69) was accompanied by a translation of the Enchiridion by the prolific scholar-cleric Jean-Baptiste Morvan abbé de Bellegarde (1648–1734). Boileau’s introduction states that “some authors have suggested that Epictetus might have been secretly Christian, because one finds on his writings many maxims which spread contempt for honors and riches, the love of poverty and the private life, and forgiving one’s enemies, which do not have the flavor of ancient Philosophers.”Footnote ⁸⁵ This claim, he says, is based on the fact that Epictetus’s master Epaphroditos was Nero’s captain of the guard and helped Saint Paul while he was in prison, so some speculate that Epictetus might have heard his master talk about the apostle and his doctrines, or even attended his master’s secret meetings with Saint Paul.Footnote ⁸⁶ “But it is not possible to conclude with certainty that he renounced Stoic philosophy, or pagan superstitions,” Boileau concludes.Footnote ⁸⁷ Rather, “What Epictetus had uniquely, out of all the pagan Philosophers, is that he advanced the furthest into our mysteries, and had the best opinions touching divinity. In effect, he was so in accordance with Christianity that St. Augustine, who was a foe of all the ancient philosophers, spoke very favorably of [Epictetus] alone. For which reason it is not a problem to honor him with the title ‘most wise.’”Footnote ⁸⁸ Despite this celebration of the uniqueness of Epictetus’s theological wisdom, Boileau also made syncretic moves, claiming that “Epictetus held Pyrrho in particular veneration, because he didn’t recognize any difference between life and death… . He imitated in words and deeds the lifestyles of Socrates, Zeno and Diogenes … he particularly venerated Socrates, and fashioned himself after him.”Footnote ⁸⁹ Yet, Boileau continued, Epictetus “as much as he strongly esteemed Pyrrho, conceived such an extraordinary grudge and hatred for the Pyrrhonists that he could not endure them.”Footnote ⁹⁰ This last comment reflects the intellectual atmosphere of the early eighteenth century, which was still saturated by the skeptical crisis sparked by Montaigne, and the battles waged against it by Bacon, Descartes, and their followers. Epictetus was welcome as another ally against skepticism. Yet, while Epictetus might have seemed innocuous in 1704, Boileau’s celebration of this pagan who advanced so far into Christian mysteries contains within it that seed of radicalism I am attempting to describe.

To demonstrate why, I will jump back 200 years to the first Renaissance Epictetan paratext, Poliziano’s 1479 dedication to Lorenzo de Medici. Comparing Epictetus’s philosophical work to Heracles’s battle with the Centaurs, Poliziano wrote, “Yet our Epictetus received his arms, not from Vulcan (like Achilles and Aeneas) but from Nature herself and Reason, by which means he showed himself safe and untouchable, not only by darts and swords but also by fear and suffering and other disturbances of soul. This man waged bitter warfare, not with Centaurs (like [Heracles]) but with fortune and (false) opinion, both of which he laid low and put to flight, so that he expelled them too from all of human life.”Footnote ⁹¹ This is a typical humanist celebration of the eudaemonist claims of classical philosophy. But Poliziano’s Epictetus received his arms from nature and reason, by which he prevailed over misery and error—nature and reason alone, nothing beyond. Remember, similarly, how eighty years later Jean de Coras would write that Epictetus’s maxim “sustain and abstain … divinely Christian and Christianly divine, in a few words encapsulates the law, and the prophets, and that which St. Paul himself worked hardest to accomplish.”Footnote ⁹² Epictetus was more successful than Saint Paul, and his followers more Christian than Christians, all thanks to reason. As the 1583 Italian translation boasts, “[Epictetus’s Enchiridion] using human reason, persuades people of many things which we are divinely commanded,” including traditional Christian lessons: to obey God, do good, tolerate wrongs—all necessary for the holy ordering of human affairs.Footnote ⁹³ Arcerius in his 1598 treatment of Pythagoras went further, saying that “the Socratic School, Mosaic” school, founded by God, taught virtue and truth “without God or the help of Scripture.”Footnote ⁹⁴

Though the venue is strange, and the reason stranger, these lives contain early articulations of the Enlightenment celebration of reason as an independent path to truth, requiring no revelation. This is the kind of independent reason that will be so core to Enlightenment radicalisms, both theist and atheist. The path from humanist excitement about ancient philosophical religion to the Enlightenment cult of reason had several steps. Fifteenth-century humanists such as Poliziano, Aurispa, and Filelfo made the excited but modest claims of first discoverers, astonished and vindicated by finding that—as Petrarch had prophesied—their long-sought ancients did indeed align miraculously with Christianity. Both the ancients’ teachings and their lives, framed with quanto maius rhetoric, seemed likely to help teach a sinful Europe to be more modest, temperate, peaceful, and saintly. That a wise person in a foreign age could discover the nature of divinity by reason’s light alone seemed, to these humanists, to be another welcome proof of the truth of Christianity, rather than anything that might undermine the necessity of revelation.

In the later 1400s, Ficino and other syncretists sought to explain the similarity between Christian and pagan theology, now attributed to the influence of Hellenistic and Neoplatonic thought on early Christianity. But Ficino and his peers had a different chronology, placing pseudo-Dionysius centuries too early, mistaking late antique verses for pre-Socratic fragments, and reading too literally Boethius’s (ca. 480–524) ubiquitous image of Lady Philosophy walking happily with early thinkers, while in later ages her robe was shredded and carried off in scraps by selfish inferior schools.Footnote ⁹⁵ Ficino’s intellectual genealogy of pre-Christian sages depicted an original, pure, untattered theology fragmenting as it traveled forward from Moses to later ancients who clutched its scraps. In constructing this timeline, Ficino mistook Neoplatonism—now considered a late, syncretic hybrid of Platonism and other ancient schools—for the original, and he mistook what are now considered separate schools—Stoicism, Aristotelianism, Epicureanism—for the shredded scraps waiting to be knit back together by the aid of Lady Philosophy.

After Ficino’s death in 1499, sixteenth-century scholars acquired more sources, and began to identify some of Ficino’s chronological and factual errors. Successors modified or rejected the details of his genealogy, but retained the image which the concept of a philosophical revelation had forever sealed onto the Sistine Chapel ceiling: ancient sages seeing truth by a light far older than that shed by the Incarnation. When in 1610 John Healey wrote that the pagan Epictetus composed a book that is the handmaid to Augustine’s; when the editor of the 1652 Cologne Enchiridion told his impious Christian peers that what they needed to stop sinning was the light that reached primitive peoples in the midst of pagan night; when edition after edition boasted that the pagan Epictetus was a friend of God, these images of the relationship between truth and reason contain within them inadvertent seeds of deism. These statements are rhetoric, not logical arguments, but they imply that there are better places to seek divine truth than scripture, laying the groundwork for later attacks on the necessity of revelation and organized religion.Footnote ⁹⁶ And all this was voiced by scholars motivated primarily by their excitement at how well the ancients harmonized with Christian truth.

Epictetus’s humanist biographers never doubted Petrarch’s interpretation of Augustine’s statement “every truth is true because it derives from the truth.” Recall Kors’s observations: most Scholastics were so confident that reason would prove God’s existence, never his nonexistence, that they assumed practice attacks on proofs of the existence of God could never harm the faith.Footnote ⁹⁷ Just so, humanists trusted that unbridled reason, even exercised by pagans, must lead to Christian truth. Humanist didactic rhetoric, by spreading and celebrating the assumption that Christianity was completely rational, encouraged later attempts to rationalize Christianity, and to reach theological truth through reason alone, as the ancients had. Humanists promised their readers that such attempts would yield nothing but a purer, cleaner, universal orthodoxy.

The Next Generations

In 1646, Johann Chrysostom Magnenus (1590–1679), teaching medicine at the University of Pavia, published Democritus Reviviscens, Sive, De Atomis, a defense of atomism similar to that of his more famous contemporary Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655).Footnote ⁹⁸ Democritus Reviviscens elaborates an atomist system that goes much further than what can be gleaned from fragments of Democritus (ca. 460–ca. 370 BCE), and includes the results of many of Magnenus’s original experiments.Footnote ⁹⁹ Since Magnenus is mainly known today as an early and eager practitioner of experimental science in the wake of Galileo (1564–1642), his work has mainly been studied by historians of science, who often refer to Democritus Reviviscens by its second title, De Atomis. But the work introduces itself in a thoroughly humanist spirit, as an effort to “restore the philosophy of the Atomists—firstborn among all the sects of philosophers—and to vindicate from a thousand calumnies the obscured fame of their doctrines.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The volume’s front matter, with its lengthy vita of Democritus, is more than a classicizing veneer over controversial Galilean science. The 1648 reprint even dropped De Atomis from the title, renaming the work Democritus Reviviscens, sive, Vita et Philosophia Democriti. This made Democritus Reviviscens an even more direct competitor with what had been the dominant source on Democritus, the 1616 Democritus Christianus of Reference dePierre de Besse (1567–1639).Footnote ¹⁰¹ The book, like its companion Heraclitus Christianvs,Footnote ¹⁰² is full of familiar Christianizing arguments, citing Plato and scripture freely and presenting Democritus as a paragon of contempt for vanity and of philosophical asceticism.

In Democritus Reviviscens, Magnenus also used familiar arguments, commingled with something new. His dedication first celebrates Boethius as an example of philosophy triumphing over tyranny.Footnote ¹⁰³ A list of testimonia follows, and a vita celebrating Democritus’s rejection of luxury, the concordance between his morals and Seneca’s, and his philosophical pilgrimages. A genealogy of sages comes next, with Pythagoras in his usual place, but Magnenus’s list continues past church fathers to other figures whose brilliance Democritus prefigured: Kepler (1571–1630), Galileo, Christoph Scheiner (1573–1650), and Anton Maria Schyrleus of Rheita (1604–60), the astronomer and maker of Kepler’s telescope.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Magnenus’s address to the learned reader begins—much like Erasmus’s life of Seneca—with the declaration that all philosophers can be divided into three categories; but instead of a topical division into natural philosophy, ethics, and dialectic, Magnenus’s division is methodological: “Our age has poured forth a threefold race of philosophizers. One type are slaves to a certain fixed author [i.e., Aristotle], to whose words they are bound as if by chains of adamant; hence they put all their zeal into finding senses [in texts] favorable to their Prince [i.e., Aristotle], and think up subterfuges to protect him, and if it is not allowed to engage in open warfare, they use stratagems. These are the Peripatetics of today, who, making time for Aristotle alone, don’t understand the difference between explaining an author and adhering to his opinions.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Such criticism is familiar from both humanist and seventeenth-century anti-Scholastic rhetoric. The passage continues: “A second kind are defenders of philosophical liberty, who place no weight on authority and all on reason, and make themselves either the arbiters of Nature or the restorers of Arcady: these men give rise to new [philosophical] sects, whether they possess true wisdom or are rushing headlong into ambitious error.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶

As heroes of this camp, Magnenus named Democritus alongside new figures: Tommaso Campanella (1568–1639), Tyco Brahe (1546–1601), Kepler, Galileo, Christoph Scheiner, “innumerable” mathematicians and experimental philosophers, and all who agree that “Plato is a friend, Aristotle is a friend, but the greater friend is Truth.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Here the innovations of seventeenth-century science are visible, already splitting into factions, and while Magnenus did not name those he thought were rushing into ambitious error, his words invoke contemporary criticisms of Descartes. Meanwhile, “The third kind of philosophers, having either scorned or already sampled recent views, went back to [ancient] philosophy as to a tired old woman, and inquired whether the torch now collapsed into ashes yet had any of its former beauty and strength. Thus Copernicus educed the astrology of Aristarchus of Samos; Marsilio Ficino and his Florentines honored Plato’s doctrines; and the elegant Lucretius recited in part the philosophy of Empedocles, almost worn out after many ages; and we attempt in this book to restore the philosophy of Democritus.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Despite placing his own work in this third camp, with the charming but outdated humanists, Magnenus concluded that, “Of these three sects, if you want my view, I would say that all of them deserve honor, but the most important one is that which pays homage to the Sun of reason alone.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹

The light of reason is an ancient image, transformed many times between book 6 of Plato’s Republic and the Enlightenment. Magnenus’s light of reason in Democritus Reviviscens is at a very particular moment of transition. The text is a hybrid, experimental science nested inside classical revival. Magnenus’s Democritus is simultaneously a trailblazing peer of Galileo, and the pious, monastic ancient sage celebrated by humanists. His character, according to Magnenus, was “outstanding in personal or private conduct [mores privatos seu monasticam], sarcastic in public conduct, serious in political conduct, indifferent toward matters of wealth; he excelled in the physical sciences, especially that of plants and natural magic, as they call it, and he handed down many mysteries, to which Seneca, Pliny and Constantine Caesar bear witness.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ The monastic asceticism so long celebrated by Christianizing humanists remains. And yet, for Magnenus, Democritus is not a peer of Aquinas and Dominic, but of Kepler and Tyco Brahe, an exemplar of the kind of philosophy that puts the light of reason above all. Magnenus’s focus on reason and his choice to categorize philosophers by method, instead of by topic as Erasmus had, were fruits of the seventeenth century, reminiscent of Francis Bacon, but their seeds were planted by Petrarch’s rhetoric long before.

Another late sixteenth-century example of the consequences of the new intellectual habitat that humanist celebrations of philosophy provided will help clarify their three-stage impact. Socinianism—infamous across Europe in the seventeenth century—has primarily been studied as a step in the history of anti-Trinitarianism and Reformation confessional conflict. Sarah Mortimer has recently demonstrated that Socinianism played a formative role in the development of several intellectual signatures of Enlightenment thought, especially ideas of natural law essential to Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Thomas Paine, and other pillars of Enlightenment reform.Footnote ¹¹¹ The movement’s founder, Faustus Socinus (1539–1604), is not labeled a humanist, but he knew his ancients well enough to cite Livy and Plutarch as comfortably as Justin and John Chrysostom.Footnote ¹¹² His own library was destroyed by a riot in Krakow,Footnote ¹¹³ and quotations in his works are too scarce to make a reconstruction practical; but his itinerary gives a good sense of the libraries where this eclectic reader encountered both pagans and church fathers. The young Socinus joined his uncle Celso Sozzini’s Accademia del Sizienti in Sienna, and worked in Florence for at least a decade for Isabella de Medici, daughter of Grand Duke Cosimo.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Both Sienna’s and Florence’s many libraries were packed with humanist-edited editions of pagan and Christian authorities, of which the easiest to use were later, more compact editions with humanist paratexts. Socinus also spent time in the printing centers of Lyon and Basel, which, after 1540, poured out humanist-edited classics, the majority of which contained biographies as front matter.Footnote ¹¹⁵

Socinus’s infamous technique of subjecting scripture to the same critical analysis as any historical source employed humanist methods of textual criticism, familiar from the works of figures such as Lorenzo Valla and Machiavelli, and common in the Florentine scholarly circles in which Socinus participated.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Yet skill with textual criticism is not the most substantial consequence of Socinus’s Italian humanist roots, even if it is the most visible. Among Socinus’s primary convictions, as Mortimer has demonstrated, was his rejection of the corruption of the will, insisting that humans before and after both Adam’s Fall and Christ’s Incarnation had always possessed the same intellectual freedom and the ability to consciously choose a path of religion and virtue.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Christianity, he argued, encouraged virtue primarily by providing incentives, but both virtue and salvation were always available to any human who chose them, even without Christ and his sacrifice.Footnote ¹¹⁸

Socinus’s position clearly reflects humanist ideas of good pagans achieving theological wisdom before Christ, without any impediment from corrupted will. Socinus was substantially more radical than the humanist peers he left behind in Florence, and his infamous claim that humans have no innate or natural knowledge of religion, and no way to know God without the historical documentation provided by scripture, was in some sense as anathema to Boileau’s Epictetus, who advanced deep into theological mysteries by reason alone, as it is to the theory of innate ideas.Footnote ¹¹⁹ But while Socinus did not embrace the humanist philosophical revelation narrative, his thought was clearly shaped by it as he took the radical steps of treating Hebrew, Christian, and pagan access to theological truth as equals, and insisting that natural reason and human moral judgment are the only causes of virtue and piety. Humanist editors of Epictetus and Pythagoras claimed that the light of reason alone gave pagans moral and religious wisdom perhaps better than that of Christians. Socinus, growing up on their editions of the classics, went on to claim that humans did not need Christianity, revelation, or even religion to exercise rational virtue. Fierce reactions from Catholics and Protestants alike made this Socinian idea a major talking point across Europe, and it then lay in the background as Pierre Bayle (1647–1706), in his discussion of Spinoza, penned his explosive claim that an atheist could be a good citizen.Footnote ¹²⁰ Radical deism, and the arguments for religious tolerance made by Bayle’s avid reader Voltaire (1694–1778), lie one short step beyond. This three-stage transition, from humanist-framed classroom editions, to the education of Reformation and seventeenth-century figures, to their respondents in the radical Enlightenment, enabled the intellectual habitat shaped by the humanist celebration of antiquity to foster later thinkers who would never have identified themselves as humanists, who did not go out of their way to read humanists, and whom no humanist would recognize as anything but an alien and frightening stranger.

Conclusion: The Light of Reason

The Platonic, Augustinian light of reason, which so excited Petrarch and Ficino, had been a servant of theology, expected to reinforce the truths of Christian orthodoxy, which it would not change except by brushing a few medieval cobwebs off the truth. Early humanists expected this excavated truth to be a clearer version of an unchanging truth incompletely described by sages from Thomas Aquinas back to Epictetus, Plato, Pythagoras, and Moses. The first humanist readers of Seneca and Epictetus were delighted to find them so orthodox—as they read them—and full of moral lessons that could further the program of virtue politics, and make Europe’s bellicose Christians act more like Christians. But by the later sixteenth century, humanist enthusiasm for the pre-Christian light of reason had progressed so far that a student’s copy of the Enchiridion claimed to teach virtue better than scripture could. The rhetorical technique of quanto maius had morphed. The message was no longer that Christians should feel shame if they fell short of the pagans, but that the pagan method of seeking wisdom by reason alone was extremely powerful, if not superior to seeking it through revelation. If the owner of such an Enchiridion visited the Florentine Badia—a center of orthodoxy—and there saw Filippino Lippi’s 1480 altarpiece The Virgin and Angels Appearing to Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, which features Epictetus’s maxim “sustain and abstain” pinned on the craggy stone of Bernard’s desk, the painting now communicated an unintended secondary message to the sixteenth-century viewer: that Epictetus achieved the same wisdom as Bernard without the help of Mary and the angels.

These are the inadvertent secularizing seeds planted by humanists. Even if there were impious humanists—some Machiavellis and Pomponazzis among the Ficinos—humanism was not a great secularizing project. From Petrarch on, humanism’s goals had been compatible with, even productive of, Christian piety. But over time, humanist inflationary rhetoric so transformed classic images that they gained radical implications, as even Augustine’s quanto maius formula turned into a celebration of reason’s independence of scripture. These radical implications then became intellectual tools, reused by figures like Socinus and Magnenus to advance more radical positions. Magnenus and his seventeenth-century peers were also primarily pious Christians, but their innovations developed yet more new intellectual tools that would, in a third stage, become the intellectual habitat that facilitated the Enlightenment’s deism, its attacks on dogmatism, its calls for religious tolerance, and, in its wildest corners, its atheism. Hieronymus Wolf in his 1563 Epictetus edition, boldly titled Enchiridion, Hoc Est Pugio, sive Ars Humanae Vitae Correctrix (Enchiridion, i.e., the dagger, or the method for correcting human life), had written: “Philosophers speak of God more briefly, coldly, obscurely, while Theology does so more ardently, volubly, and eloquently. But in instruction of morals and life lessons, generally the same is related by both sides,” adding that, “Saint Paul chided philosophy—that is human reason—sternly for stepping beyond its bounds … yet, so long as it performs its duty, and subjects itself to God, it embellishes the Good News [i.e., the Gospel] to whose power nothing can be added.”Footnote ¹²¹ Philosophy is a powerful art, but Wolf and his peers did not expect that herald, that dagger, that correction, to strike so deep.

Returning briefly to the historiographical debate between a Christian Renaissance and a secularizing or pagan Renaissance, I do not seek to argue that the pious motives I depict mean that humanist Christianity was orthodox, or monolithic. I agree with the observations of Matteo Soranzo and others that the new Christianities developed by humanists were plural and often pluralistic, attempting to embrace and balance multiple difficult-to-reconcile authorities, often with results that threatened orthodoxy.Footnote ¹²² As Soranzo observed, the very narrative of philosophical revelation advanced by Ficino and Giovanni Pico deeply troubled Gianfrancesco Pico, who labored to diminish aspects of his uncle’s work that threatened the differently radical, partly Savonarolan Christianity that Gianfrancesco came to embrace. Yet all these figures’ different humanist theologies were self-consciously Christian, and theist. As Soranzo and others call for more examination of the truly surprising theologies present in humanist works, I hope scholars will consider these theologies as divergent but potentially sincere theisms, and neither attempt to blur them into orthodoxy, nor return to the problematic technique of presuming that anyone expressing a radical variant on Christianity was a secret atheist feigning theism to escape the stake. If the Lutheran break spawned a hundred Protestantisms, so the classical revival spawned a hundred humanist Christianities, which should not be reduced to Christian or pagan camps. Inflating the pagan or secularizing camp has been the more common error, in my view, but, as the Christian Renaissance model gains dominance among historians, the danger of the reverse increases.

To conclude, throughout the Middle Ages, Christian philosophers and theologians had always had scripture, doctrine, and church fathers to provide fixed points of certain knowledge. Theology took place within a partially precharted space, where details—such as the information given about God in the Nicene Creed—served as streetlights outlining points on a path, while theologians labored to chart out the dark spots in between. Humanists, in contrast, celebrated, and relived through empathy, the experience of ancient thinkers, whom they imagined wandering in the dark night of genuine ignorance, groping toward distant knowledge without streetlights ahead. By extolling this experience, maturing humanism exhorted students to imitate how people without revealed answers had sought them out by reason’s light alone. Humanists were sure that practitioners of their new method would end up where they believed the ancients had ended up: at the light, the good, God, truth, the source and center of all things. The biographies and other didactic works that humanists gifted to the reading world would, they hoped, achieve their dream of virtue-dominated politics, a better Europe guided by the light—both Christian and universal—that shone from such sages as Epictetus and Saint Paul.

Yet, as the sixteenth century became the seventeenth, it became clearer that Epictetus did not agree with Saint Paul, that Stoic divinity was fully immanent, that Pythagoreans were serious about reincarnation, and in general that the philosophical religion of antiquity was larger and stranger than what Petrarch had expected his followers to excavate from the manuscripts he urged them to recover. In the same dynamic decades of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, experimental and descriptive science yielded a stream of new and strange discoveries at odds with received theology and classical science. As inherited doctrine fell apart, humanist descriptions of great ancients, who began philosophy from nothing, waited ready on the bookshelves of Socinus, Bacon, Descartes, Magnenus, and, later, of Voltaire, Rousseau, Thomas Paine, and Diderot. Humanists had celebrated the ancient acolytes of Philosophia because they believed Philosophia had led her sages—and could lead others—to the Christian truths that were so bafflingly difficult to reach using the tools of scripture and the corruption-ridden church. Yet, in the hands of much later generations, the enthusiasm for Philosophia that humanist teachings had rekindled outlived Philosophia’s loyalty to Lady Theology. Herein lay the secularizing potential of the pious Renaissance.