Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Style Is the Man Himself: Eloquence and the Revival of Roman Virtue in Renaissance Humanism

2022; Penn State University Press; Volume: 31; Issue: 1-2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/goodsociety.31.1-2.0150

1538-9731

Michelle T. Clarke,

Renaissance Literature and Culture

James Hankins's Virtue Politics is a masterful contribution to the study of the history of political thought, and especially Renaissance humanism. An enormous amount of scholarly research has positioned itself in relation to something that it calls "Renaissance humanism." But Virtue Politics reveals the extent to which this seemingly well-trodden ground remains unexplored, and even unmapped. As one might expect from a scholar who has spent a lifetime sifting through the relevant materials, Hankins proves to be a first-rate guide through its rich and varied terrain.Virtue Politics is a big book—big in terms of length, clocking in at over 700 pages, but also, and far more importantly, big in its ambition. It surveys one of the most formative intellectual movements in history and forges an answer to what is perhaps the most fundamental question that can be asked about it: namely, what, if anything, made Renaissance humanism a coherent enterprise? This is a question that has found no settled answer in the vast and churning secondary literature on the subject, which Hankins (mercifully, perhaps) avoids picking through in any real detail. While early treatments of the subject by Burckhardt and Baron forwarded very strong claims about humanism's role in the advent of modern individualism and its possession of a unifying ideological agenda, respectively, they did so on the basis of a rather selective accounting of the evidence, which in turn allowed for an explosion of significant and now well-known rebuttals, evaluations, syntheses, and reworkings by Paul Kristeller, Eugenio Garin, Jerrold Seigel, William Bouwsma, Charles Trinkaus, Hanna Gray, Ronald Witt, Lauro Martines, Quentin Skinner, Benjamin Kohl, Paul Grendler, Robert Black, and many others in the decades that followed. Even so, as Christopher Celenza has recently argued, we still lack a compelling understanding of humanism: one that is adequately grounded in the vast expanse of Renaissance texts, most of which still remain untranslated, and sufficiently to the complexity and vibrancy of humanist culture, with all its seemingly inexhaustible vitality. Whether or not Hankins was the unnamed scholar who, in a private conversation with Celenza at a Florentine villa, first stimulated his curiosity about why scholarly debate about the nature, extent, and import of the Italian Renaissance eventually just "fizzled out," Virtue Politics stands as a worthy answer to Celenza's call.1Virtue Politics introduces—and sometimes reintroduces—us to a vast collection of thinkers and writers who disagreed about virtually everything, it seems, as they worked their way through a broad assemblage of topics relating to the nature of public life. The principles of social cohesion, issues of war and peace, thorny questions about the intermingling of wealth and political power, advice about how to live under a corrupt regime, whether popular government can be safeguarded against the dangers of populism and mob rule, the possibility of a cosmopolitan world order—humanists wrote enthusiastically, and often insightfully, about all these subjects and more, showing that even just within the domain of political theory humanism's intellectual reach went far beyond the specific concerns associated with what has since become known as "civic humanism."2 Moreover, Hankins demonstrates that there was never a singularly humanist perspective regarding these issues. Nor was there even a fixed and inflexible hierarchy of ancient source materials to which humanists referred in their attempts to understand them more thoroughly. Cicero, Aristotle, Seneca, Plutarch, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Xenophon, Herodotus, Pliny, Plato, Thucydides, Isocrates, Polybius, Sallust—all of these writers were read voraciously and pitted against one another in the sometimes friendly, sometimes not-so-friendly, disputes that kept humanism alive.Given this incredible multiplicity and variability, it is tempting to conclude that humanism lacked any unifying characteristics at all apart from a somewhat hazy and underdetermined interest in reviving the classical past. But, as Hankins emphasizes throughout his book, humanists returned to the past with a common purpose. In studying antiquity, he asserts, they hoped to gather the materials whereby it would be possible to improve, and indeed ennoble, their own political environments. These constructive materials, they believed, were lodged in the surviving texts of the ancient world. Remarkably various in themselves, classical sources were regarded as a repository of lost wisdom about the qualities essential for good leadership and the basis of what Hankins calls a "new institutio," or form of soulcraft, that humanists hoped would wrench Italy out of its current state of civilizational crisis and restore its lost glory.3 Hankins calls this agenda "virtue politics" and argues that its core conviction, the idea that a community's political well-being depends on the moral and spiritual character of its leaders, formed the spine that held Renaissance humanism together.Virtue Politics traces this notion across twenty-one chapters, each organized around a central figure. While the book contains a wealth of particulate information about Renaissance literary culture, it remains fully digestible even to nonspecialists, thanks to Hankins's easy-going, conversational writing style. Moreover, the book as a whole is written from a distinct authorial perspective, which has the attraction of transforming what might otherwise be an unwieldy swirl of unfamiliar thought into something coherent. And importantly, it does all this without imposing too rigid an exoskeleton on its sweeping collection of minds. Under the broad canopy of "virtue politics," figures as disparate as Cyriac of Ancona, Decembrio, Boccaccio, Petrarch, and Patrizi are given the space not only to be distinct from one another, but even ambivalent and indecisive within themselves. It would be fair to say that among the many virtues of Virtue Politics is that it allows its humanists to be human.The story of Renaissance humanism that unfolds in the pages of Virtue Politics is a sprawling one, to be sure. But it's neatly bookended by two major thinkers, Petrarch and Machiavelli. On the one side, we are presented with a Petrarch who accomplished far more than some textual finding and fixing. According to Hankins, Petrarch invested these bookish activities with the animating purpose that gave shape and meaning to humanism for generations after, making him fully deserving of the old appellation "Father of the Renaissance."4 As Hankins puts it, "It was he who deepened the admiration for ancient authors that had long existed in medieval culture into a . . . longing for the restoration of lost qualities of mind, for the return of ancient virtue." On the other side stands Machiavelli, humanism's most formidable opponent. While his education and style may have been influenced by humanism, Hankins maintains, Machiavelli rejected humanism's defining ethical and political commitments, and this is what matters most when assessing the nature of their relationship. As Hankins puts it, Machiavelli dispensed with humanism's moderate perfectionism and abandoned its commitment to virtue politics, pitting himself against all those who would pretend that honorableness is a political asset. For 150 years, humanists had stood for the idea that leaders had "to be and do good" in order to be legitimate. Machiavelli exploded that grounding assumption.5This is a very compressed summary of what Virtue Politics has to say about the rise and fall of Renaissance humanism, and even just the roles that Petrarch and Machiavelli are said to have played in that drama. Nevertheless, I wonder if there isn't more that could be said about the ways in which Petrarch and Machiavelli frame humanism's investment in one or another form of virtue politics—including what they believed the study of language could reveal and/or contribute to that project.As Hankins reminds us, humanists valued the study of eloquence for many different reasons: it enabled a more accurate understanding of ideas about virtue and good governance circulating in classical texts; it promoted clarity of communication among the educated, which was especially useful in comparing the merits of different political positions and policies; it made speech more persuasive, helping to translate mere words into action; and it was simply beautifying, with the happy effect that it lent the study of virtue its own powers of attraction. These arguments on behalf of the study of eloquence were themselves rooted in antiquity, and especially the work of Cicero—it was he, after all, who first declared that oratory aims to instruct, to please, and to move.6But Cicero also believed that language possessed a more immediate relationship with the mind, such that it was possible to say that "only a man of clear-thinking intelligence [prudenter intellegit] can speak well" and, conversely, that "the devotee of real eloquence is a devotee of clear thinking."7 On this view, eloquence was intrinsically connected with individual self-development in that it both revealed the speaker's soul and helped to further improve it. The idea that speech, as an outward manifestation of the inner person, stood as reliable testimony of his interior character and capacities proved to be a lasting one, such that Quintilian could later assert that it was impossible to be a good orator without being a good man.8 So too with the idea that character was something that could be shaped and molded by the discipline of good speech—it helps to make sense of, among other things, the fact that grammarians became the ultimate guardians of culture in the late antique period.9Petrarch echoes these ideas about language in a letter to Tommaso Messina, in which he describes the relationship between virtue and eloquence in especially intimate terms. Virtue requires not only philosophy, which helps to develop the mind, but also eloquence, he says—because it is primarily through speech that the mind expresses itself in the world. Thus, he continues, virtue requires not only the correction of "life and behavior" but also "our practice of speaking" through the acquisition of "artful eloquence." For "speech is no small reflection of the mind [animi], nor does the mind play a small part in controlling speech. The one depends on the other; however the one is hidden in the breast, the other comes out in public. The mind grooms speech as it is about to emerge, and shapes it as it wants, whereas speech as it emerges announces the nature of the mind; it obeys the mind's judgment, and speech provides the evidence we trust."10Petrarch's whole letter develops a fascinating argument for the view that beautiful speech is the expression of a well-ordered animus and, conversely, that a well-ordered animus is the foundation of beautiful speech. Among other things, it helps us to understand why humanists thought it so important to get the language right when dealing with ancient texts. Humanists spent an astonishing amount of time debating the smallest details of spelling, diction, syntax, idiomatic usage, and grammar, and it is easy enough to misinterpret these controversies as being markers of intellectual malformation, misdirection, or decay: proof that humanism was, or at some point became, consumed by triviality, betraying its moral and political pretensions and lapsing into an all-too-familiar mode of academic pedantry.11 But it all makes rather more sense when we read Petrarch's letter, or other humanist articulations of the idea that the acquisition and use of eloquence is itself a crucial medium of ethical development and expression. Consider, for example, Leonardo Bruni's De Studiis et Litteris Liber (c. 1424), in which he comments on the need for teachers who can "train and as it were initiate [a young person's mind] so that it can recognize not only the parts of speech and their arrangement, but also . . . smaller details and elements of speech"—bits of knowledge that, typically, "we absorb in childhood as though dreaming," he says, such that "they somehow come back to our lips" later in life, when we can finally "taste their sweetness and true flavor [sucus saporque verus exprimantur]."12 Here, as elsewhere in humanistic literature, the aesthetic attributes of language are characterized as having formative powers with respect to the soul and as being increasingly perceptible in themselves when in the presence of mature intellectual and moral faculties.Bruni supports the idea that beauty, pleasure, and wisdom are internally linked by recruiting the linguistic proximity of sapore and sapere, a well-worn pun found in both ancient and medieval texts.13 In his Italia Illustrata (1453), Flavio Biondo also uses the metaphor of taste, now to chart the decline and recovery of Latin eloquence, writing that "those who taste the flavor of Latin literature [sapore degustant]" will know that very little of what was written after the early Church Fathers displayed any true elegance and that it was Petrarch who finally "began to arouse poetry and eloquence" once again with his rediscoveries of Cicero. According to Biondo, Petrarch's love of Roman literature was transferred by way of his copyist, Giovanni Malpaghini, to the great luminaries of the humanist tradition, Leonardo Bruni, Pierpaolo Vergerio, Iacopo Angeli, Poggio Bracciolini, and others, whose passion for learning set in motion ever more significant textual discoveries, transcriptions, and translations.14 In this context, Biondo can be seen as replying to early Christian writers like Cassiodorus, who had repurposed the Roman metaphor of taste as way of describing Christian spiritual experience, urging believers to savor instead the sweetness of the Lord.15 Taste, in the writings of Renaissance humanists, was a return to the idea that human virtue could be impacted within the compositional elements of literature and encountered through the senses, as an element of aesthetic perception.Against the backdrop of this moralized conception of style, rooted in antiquity, Machiavelli's criticism of humanism in terms of taste—or more precisely, its tastelessness—in the preface to Book 1 of the Discourses on Livy takes on a somewhat deeper meaning. Famously, Machiavelli holds that despite humanism's obsession with ancient Greece and Rome, it has nevertheless failed to grasp antiquity's essential nature, as proven by the fact that while so many people busy themselves with collecting ancient statues and imitating classical art, "in ordering republics, maintaining states, governing kingdoms, ordering the military and administering war, judging subjects, and increasing empire, neither prince nor republic may be found that has recourse to the examples of the ancients." Why, he asks? Not because of the weakness caused by Christianity or the "ambitious idleness" that has afflicted Christian provinces, but rather because his contemporaries still do not have a "true knowledge of histories, through not getting from reading them that sense nor tasting that flavor that they have in themselves" (vera cognizione delle Istorie, per non trarne, leggendole, qual senso, nè gustare di loro quell sapore che le hanno in sè). So much for the promise of recovering ancient virtue through the recovery of ancient style.Machiavelli's jab at humanism's alleged superficiality contains, I think, a deeper theoretical point about the gap between literary form and content that echoes his more well-known statements about the need to distinguish carefully between how things seem and what they really are (i.e., appearance versus reality). If the imitation of classical forms, including literary forms, has not engendered the imitation of classical political practice, as someone like Petrarch would have expected, it suggests that perhaps there is no essential connection between the component elements of beautiful speech and political virtue. Harmony, balance, symmetry, rhythm, elegance, moderation—these might be qualities that are completely alien to politics and, moreover, qualities that must stand at a distance from effective political action. If this is the case, then the humanist approach to the study of antiquity would turn out to be flawed and misleading. It would be revealed as being an enterprise that deceives itself with respect to the lessons contained within ancient texts, through an overemphasis on the aesthetic experience of reading.While Machiavelli never explicitly details this reply to humanism's preoccupation with eloquence, arguably Petrarch's most formative and lasting legacy, he writes both the Prince and Discourses in a way that reflects its underlying doubts. As Robert Black has noted, the preface to The Prince contains an open disavowal of "the Ciceronian rhetorical style favored by the humanists."16While it would be difficult to maintain that Machiavelli disregards style altogether in order to focus exclusively on substance, he certainly seems to be suggesting that one has precious little to do with the other. And indeed, in at least some important respects, his works are appropriately described as being stylistically denuded. Take, for example, the Discourses. Apart from some direct quotations, it is pulled out of the Latin language altogether, compositionally scrambled, and its narrative pathos is erased. A reader interested in "Livian style," in this case, would be hard-pressed to find it replicated in the Discourses. And as far as the study of ancient virtue is concerned, I think Machiavelli believes that is just fine.