Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

18 THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE
Timaeus, in which Plato was believed to describe the creation of the world. 16 He
owned a manuscript containing many more of the works in Greek; but to his
great regret, he never managed to learn the language. 17 The bulk of Petrarch’s
understanding of Platonism was therefore gained from secondary sources: Cicero,
Macrobius, Apuleius, but above all Augustine. It was primarily on Augustine’s
authority that Petrarch came to believe to strongly in the essential compatibility
of Platonism with Christianity and to regard Plato as a Christian by
anticipation. 18 Petrarch’s Platonism amounted to little more than a propaganda
campaign, but it was an effective one, which paved the way for the more
philologically and philosophically ambitious efforts of fifteenth-century
scholars.
THE NEW ARISTOTELIANISM
Petrarch’s antipathy towards Aristotle was far less influential among his
followers, many of whom helped to create a new style of Aristotelianism. The
key figure in this movement was the humanist Leonardo Bruni (1370–1444), a
papal secretary and later chancellor of Florence, who became the most important
translator of Aristotle in the early fifteenth century. 19 It was not that he made new
texts available, since virtually all of Aristotle had been translated into Latin by
the end of the thirteenth century. Rather, he pioneered a novel method of
translation. Medieval translators had attempted to find a Latin equivalent for
each Greek word and to reproduce as far as possible the exact order of the
original. Bruni, who had been trained by the Byzantine scholar
Manuel Chrysoloras (c. 1350–1414), regarded such word-for-word renderings as
worthless since they distorted the meaning of the Greek. From Chrysoloras he
learned to translate not individual words but units of meaning—phrases and even
sentences. 20 From Cicero, on the other hand, Bruni learned to follow the word
order and syntactic structure of the target language (Latin) rather than that of the
source language (Greek); this meant adopting the prose style of the best classical
Latin authors, above all Cicero himself. 21
A ‘classical’ Aristotle who wrote in Ciceronian Latin was a direct challenge to
the scholastic culture of the universities, where a very different sort of Latin
Aristotle had been the mainstay of the curriculum for centuries. By retranslating
Aristotle in this way Bruni was tampering with the fundamental terminology
used by scholastics and deliberately calling into question all interpretations based
on the medieval versions. Following up a line of attack opened by Petrarch, Bruni
maintained that it was impossible for the self-professed Aristotelian philosophers
‘to grasp anything rightly…since those books which they say are Aristotle’s have
suffered such a great transformation that were anyone to bring them to Aristotle
himself, he would not recognize them as his own’. 22 Yet for all his criticisms of
these translations, Bruni himself relied on them quite heavily, using his
knowledge of Greek to correct their worst mistakes, but for the most part simply
polishing their rough-hewn Latin. 23