Humanism In The Renaissance

Humanism in the Renaissance period was an era of rebirth, a time of new thinking, and a breath of fresh air from medieval scholasticism. Spreading across Western Europe in the 14th, 15th, and 16th century, humanism was a new philosophical and ethical stance that usually favored secular thinking over an established doctrine or faith. Humanistic beliefs centered on rationalism and empiricism and were instilled in contemporary studies to challenge education in the medieval ages. Forefathers of humanism such as Petrarch believed in achieving a humanistic education through careful study and imitation of the great classical authors. Later humanists, such as Juan Ginés Sepulveda, were forced to deal with other issues such as assessing what made someone

As opposed to Sepulveda, Petrarch did not have to deal with any of the new issues regarding minorities since he lived and died before the New World was discovered in 1492. Petrarch was only aware of the Middle East, and he accepted the Muslims because they worshipped the god of Abraham. Sepulveda, a translator of the work of Aristotle, subsequently adopted his ideas and derived an Aristotelian-influenced argument on the natural slavery of the American Indian. Sepulveda begged the question, “Who’s human?” after arguing that these newly established natives were not humanistic. He believed that Bartolmé de las Casas, who was more accepting to the Indians, was merely promoting false hope and doing the natives no good. Lewis Hanke’s All Mankind Is One articulates Sepulveda’s viewpoint of inferiority in the New World: ““In prudence, talent, virtue, and humanity they are as inferior to the Spaniards as children to adults, women to men, as the wild and cruel to the most meek, as the prodigiously intemperate to the continent and temperate, that I have almost said, as monkeys to men.” In this sense, Sepulveda was closer to the truth; he argued that the natives were not human in the European way and they were realistically second-class. To treat them as such was, in his opinion, justified. Sepulveda’s work centered on how to treat the “inferior” people in the New World. According to Sepulveda, whether they were African, Jewish, or Native American, they were not a part of the established way of humanistic thinking, God didn’t choose them because they were not “human.” Sepulveda was also a proponent for war and believed that the proclaimed “barbarians” committed crimes against the laws of nature, such as human sacrifice and idolatry. All in all, Sepulveda’s arguments mirrored