His contemporaries, Niccolo
Niccoli, Giannozzo Manetti, Donato Acciaiuoli, and Pope Nicholas V,
united to a many-sided humanism profound biblical scholarship and deep
piety. In Vittorino da Feltre the same temper has been already noticed.
The same Maffeo Vegio, who added a thirteenth book to the Aeneid, had
an enthusiasm for the memory of St. Augustine and his mother, Monica,
which cannot have been without a deeper influence upon him. The result
of all these tendencies was that the Platonic Academy at Florence
deliberately chose for its object the reconciliation of the spirit of
antiquity with that of Christianity. It was a remarkable oasis in the
humanism of the period.
This humanism was in fact pagan, and became more and more so as its
sphere widened in the fifteenth century. Its representatives, whom we
have already described as the advance guard of an unbridled
individualism, display as a rule such a character that even their
religion, which is sometimes professed very definitely, becomes a
matter of indifference to us. They easily got the name of atheists, if
they showed themselves indifferent to religion and spoke freely against
the Church; but not one of them ever professed, or dared to profess, a
formal, philosophical atheism. If they sought for any leading
principle, it must have been a kind of superficial rationalism--a
careless inference from the many and contradictory opinions of
antiquity with which they busied themselves, and from the discredit
into which the Church and her doctrines had fallen This was the sort of
reasoning which was near bringing Galeotto Martio to the stake, had not
his former pupil, Pope Sixtus IV, perhaps at the request of Lorenzo de'
Medici, saved him from the hands of the Inquisition.
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