The Intellect-will Problem in the Thought of Some Northern Renaissance Humanists: Nicholas of Cusa

This essay and a subsequent one will attempt to demonstrate the inadequacy of the definition of Renaissance humanism as a movement which sought primarily secular "wisdom" by the exercise of man's wholly autonomous intellect and will. Such a definition implies that humanist thought involved a radical separation of the realm of faith-grace from the realm of intellectwill. It would exclude certain Christian scholars in the North, including Colet and Erasmus, who saw some place for human intellect and reason in the study of human behavior and its causes, but who insisted upon a distinct revelational element in the quest for ultimate truth and wisdom. They rejected the natural theology of the Scholastics, preferring rather to confine the exercise of independent intellect and will to those matters only which are distinctively human. But, in respect to their concept of wisdom and the means of achieving it, they were prepared to accord a position of primacy to revelation and grace, without denying the co-operative effectiveness of human intellect and will. The depiction of humanism as a movement which employed reason as the primary means of returning man to the ethical virtues of classical antiquity also excludes a figure such as Montaigne, who categorically rejected intellect and reason, along with revelation, as sources of unequivocal and universally applicable truth. He does not fit easily into either the revelationist or the secularist category, as so neatly differentiated for us by Eugene F. Rice.l