In our Image and Likeness: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought

Abstract

The most impressive aspect of Professor Trinkaus' work is the dexterity and the keenly in- telligent sagacity with which a tremendous mass of material has been interpreted with great insight, controlled, and co-ordinated in an extremely logical conspectus within a conveniently graspable, though complexly ramified, conceptual frame.The next feature which stands out (and even a fugitive glance at the bibliography, at the apparatus of footnotes and references, will bring the matter home to the reader) is the rare pertinacity with which the author has coped with his back-breaking assignment, over a period of several years, in direct, first-hand contact with a bewildering multiplicity of humanistic documents, geographically scattered in the major and minor libraries of Europe (see the Index of the manuscripts consulted, II, 913-916.This Index constitutes a sort of iter bumanisticum of preeminent usefulness to present and future scholars).A third feature of the volumes under review is the fidélité à soi-même, the allegiance to intellectual "form," which the volumes reveal when set side by side with cognate previous productions of Professor Trinkaus.I am referring to his Adversity's Noblemen and to A Humanist's Image of Humanism, books in which the ethical and religious aspects of the humanistic movement occupy, as they do in the present two volumes, an orientational and predominant position.The two keys to the nature and purpose of this opus are to be found in the Foreword to vol.I, and in the last chapter of vol.II, which bears the title "Unity and Plurality in the Hu- manist Visions of Man and God -an Appraisal."Essentially, Charles Trinkaus has written a history of Christian Humanism in terms of its central metaphor, i.e., the deiformitas, the dignity of Man (and in terms of its obverse).Trinkaus is principally concerned with the ethical, religious, theological, philosophical aspects of his theme.And while this concern brings his work into proximity with cognate items in the scholarly literature on Humanism (from Zabughin, Toffanin, Walser, H. Baker, to Carlo Angeleri, F. Olgiati, F. Hermans, Douglas Bush, W. Wilkinson, and others), the amplitude and detail with which Trinkaus handles his theme, the new aspects which he discovers in it, the expertise which he evinces in medie- val and post-medieval intellectual history, his amazingly thorough command of "codicolo- gical" matters, the internal ligaments which he establishes between his various sub-themes, the absolutely rectilinear and unswerving continuity of the lines of reasoning which he fol- lows and, last but not least, the non-confessional, impartial stance of its author, distinguish this history of Christian Renaissance Humanism from all its precedents and congeners.It is Trinkaus' "assumption that this period ... [Renaissance Humanism] is an autonomous period of history, and therefore should not be strictly medieval, nor modern, nor even that hybrid conception of a transition between the two, but something, clearly and definitely its own" (II, 761).It is Trinkaus' further assumption that the Humanists were not, as Professor Kristeller and other scholars have claimed, purely grammarians, mere philologists, out and out liter- ati.Some humanists were, undeniably, of this type and should be so categorized.But there

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