Chapter 9 - Aristotle's Ethics in the Renaissance

Summary

When the Italian humanist Francis Petrarch (1304–1374) defended himself against certain followers of Aristotle in his On His Own Ignorance and That of Many Others, he contrasted the approach to ethics taken by ancient Latin writers (Cicero, Seneca, Horace) with that of Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics (henceforth Ethics). It was an unequal battle: although Aristotle offers a good definition of what virtue is, Petrarch says, “his lesson lacks the words that sting and set afire and urge toward love of virtue and hatred of vice or, at any rate, does not have enough of such power. He who looks for that will find it in our Latin writers […].” Petrarch went on to explain that “our Latin writers […] stamp and drive deep into the heart the sharpest and most ardent stings of speech, by which the lazy are startled, the ailing are kindled, and the sleepy aroused, the sick healed, and the prostrate raised, and those who stick to the ground lifted up to the highest thoughts and to honest desire.” Since virtues “must be not merely known but loved,” the “true moral philosophers” are

those who do not merely teach what virtue and vice are and hammer into our ears the brilliant name of the one and the grim name of the other but sow into our hearts love of the best and eager desire for it and at the same time hatred of the worst and how to flee it. It is safer to strive for a good and pious will than for a capable and clear intellect. The object of the will, as it pleases the wise, is to be good; that of the intellect is truth. It is better to will the good than to know the truth. […] Therefore, those are far wrong who consume their time in learning to know virtue instead of acquiring it […]

In other words, Petrarch was saying, a philosophical and abstract definition of virtue or treatment of ethics is not enough: it must be accompanied by powerful language which urges the reader on in his pursuit of what is good. The implication was that this dimension was lacking in Aristotle's work. He may have been good at identifying and defining virtue, but the Ethics does not actually fill the reader with desire for it.