The Studia Humanitatis: Contemporary Scholarship and Renaissance Ideals
This is a difficult question for us to answer for two reasons. First, as a result of the deterioration of the tradition of moral philosophy in the west after the Enlightenment, the kind of deterioration that Alasdair MacIntyre describes in his well-known book After Virtue, our society is deeply confused about the meaning, purpose and possibility of moral education. "Values clarification" has replaced moral philosophy in our schools (Sommers). There is thus very little, if anything at all, in the education or experience of people living in twentieth-century America that prepares them to understand what Renaissance humanists meant by virtue. Second, the tendency of modern thought to see human behavior as motivated primarily by social and economic concerns leads to a certain skepticism and even cynicism concerning humanist moral ideals. For example, Grafton andJardine remark, without providing any hard evidence, that Guarino Guarini probably did not expect to be taken entirely seriously when he enumerated for his students the virtues to be gained through the study of moral philosophy (p. 3). I do not want to deny that changing social, economic, and political institutions attended the birth of classical education in the Renaissance. The study of Roman law certainly played a crucial ideological role in the transition from an agrarian to an urban society or, to use other terms, from a feudal to a capitalist mode of production in early modern Europe (Proctor, I21-34). But such explanatory paradigms are unable to explain fully why Renaissance humanists devoted themselves with such passion to studying the ancients, why classical education outlived by so many centuries the material conditions of its origins, and why even today, a century after the demise of classical education, we have still found nothing in our schools to replace it. Before we judge the humanists according to our own ways of