Renaissance: Context

Abstract

The author's English summary from the article:

Key words: Renaissance, Ancient Times, Middle Ages, humanism, Boccaccio, Rustaveli, knowledge, faith, episteme, Dante, individualism Renaissance self-consciously adopted the ideas of ancient Greece and Rome, especially that of Plato and Cicero.

They started to discover the beauty of form and they found Plato. At the Platonic Academy in Florence Marcilio Ficino was trying to reconcile the ideas of Plato and Moses, Socrates and Christ. Italian humanists were enchanted by the idea of combination of Christian and Pagan as well as flesh and soul, immanent and transcendent – as seen in Raphael’s “School of Athens”, where one can easily trace the effort to reconcile oppositions. This revival of interest in ancient Greece and Rome was significantly facilitated by invention of printing. Suddenly it became possible to circulate books throughout the Europe. Early historians described a clear intellectual break with the medieval era (Burckhadrt, etc).

Though recent researches proved that in fact Renaissance grew in the framework of the previous medieval era and the changes Europe experienced were more an evolution than a revolution. On the example of Bocaccio’s Decameron we try to explicate, why a human being became the most important creature in the age of Renaissance. Like Thomas Aquinas, they thought that a human being was created in God’s image and s/he is earthly and heavenly creature at the same time. Both are important for Renaissance. And since a Man is a micromodel of God, s/he is homogenous to the heavenly spheres. That’s why a Man is not considered as a sinner, on the contrary, he is perfect.

Unlike other creatures, mankind has not been assigned a fixed place in the universe. Our destiny is not determined by anything outside us. God has bestowed upon us a unique distinction: the liberty to determine the form and value our lives shall acquire. In other words, man is the master of his own destiny. The earliest expression of the Renaissance was in Humanism, an intellectual approach that developed among those being taught a new form of curriculum: the studia humanitatis, which challenged the previously dominant Scholastic thinking. Humanists were concerned with the features of human nature and attempts by man to master nature rather than develop religious piety.

Published in the journal Sjani, vol. 15 (2014), pp. 12–20. Open the paper