In 1599 an Italian heretic by the name of Domenico Scandella, otherwise known as Menocchio, was burned at the stake by the Roman Inquisition for holding heretical views. Menocchio was a peasant miller in the Friuli, a region in the northeastern part of Italy. He was a father, a husband, a sometime mayor and, in spite of his imprudent tendencies, an upstanding member of his community. And he was also a humanist.
Menocchio was a unique person for his time and place. He was literate, a relatively rare trait among peasants at that time. While Menocchio was tolerably well-off for a peasant, he was no great and wealthy figure of the likes of Petrarch, Erasmus, or Sir Thomas More. But something about Menocchio connected him to such figures. There was a thread of humanistic thought that linked Menocchio to the great humanists of the Renaissance. And it is this which makes Menocchio's story so powerful. His lot in life was that of a mere peasant with no great influence, at least in an immediate sense. In his pre-democratic society without modern ease of communication, he had even less of a voice than the typical private citizen does today. But through a combination of his access to literature and his own ingenuity and independence of mind, it can safely be said that Menocchio was not fundamentally different from the greatest humanists of the Renaissance. His approach to truth, to reality, and to life was characterized by the same traits as that of Pico or Petrarch.
There are several distinct and defining traits of humanism, this new intellectual movement which Menocchio was a part of. The first of these, and the foundational element of humanism, is intellectual independence. This independence was a kind of individualism that defied both authority and tradition—the individual, alone and unfettered, was free to discover the truth for himself. The thinker could trust his own mind and rely on its conclusions regardless of external accusations of heresy.
The second defining trait of humanism is an outgrowth of the first. Not only did the humanists believe that the individual could find truth for himself, but they also maintained that truth should be loved for its own sake, and should be sought fearlessly. They believed that the truth could stand on its own and need not fear any assault of reason.
The third and final defining element of humanism is the one that earns the intellectual movement its name. Although the humanists of the Renaissance remained devoutly religious, they placed great value on this life and on human experience, as opposed to an esoteric and distant afterlife. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola's Oration on the Dignity of Man was an embodiment of this element—man was not a thing contemptible, but a thing of nobility. This life was not to be despised, but celebrated. Menocchio embodied all three of these humanistic traits. In this, he was an heir of the Renaissance in the same sense as the greatest intellectuals of the era.
Menocchio's intellectual independence is truly remarkable given his time and place in society. His main biographer, Carlo Ginzburg, maintains that he brought to his reading a distinct set of ideas that he had formulated on his own. Menocchio faced two inquisitorial trials during his lifetime for his heretical views. Although at first he attempted to say that the devil had been tempting him, in the end he asserted that his “opinions came out of [his] head.” Certainly his reading must have influenced him, but in the end Menocchio was an independent thinker of the first order.
He shared this independence with the greatest humanists of the Renaissance. In 1486, a century before Menocchio's heresy trials, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola wrote his Oration on the Dignity of Man to accompany 900 philosophical theses that he had written. It is a spectacular defense of the nobility of the human mind and of its ability to discern truth. Pico argues that knowledge elevates man to the level of the angels, and that God created man for this end. He wrote, “philosophy has taught me to rely on my own convictions rather than on the judgments of others and to concern myself less with whether I am well thought of than whether what I do or say is evil.” This was a departure from the Catholic church's emphasis on the infallibility of the pope and the church fathers. While still a devout Catholic, Pico was making a revolutionary argument in favor of intellectual independence, praising it as a virtue rather than denigrating it as insubordinate and dangerous.
Another hundred and fifty years back in time from Pico, Petrarch wrote The Ascent of Mount Ventoux of 1336 as an early embodiment of humanistic independence. Petrarch describes his experience as he climbed a mountain in the southeast of France. He recounts how he tried to find his own way up the mountain, taking supposed shortcuts that only took him further away from his goal. Petrarch's boldness in daring to climb the mountain—something that no one had done since ancient times—and, further, in trying to seek out his own way, is indicative of the independent and exploratory character of his pursuit. Having reached the top of the mountain, Petrarch sits in quiet meditation and reads from Augustine's Confessions. This introspection and individual pursuit of paths both physical and spiritual was an apotheosis of the humanist raison d'être. Truth was not an esoteric commodity available only to a privileged few; it was the province of the individual.
Menocchio, over two and a half centuries after Petrarch climbed Ventoux, was essentially a humanist in this respect. To the humanists, among the most sacred of all rights was the right to know. Menocchio insisted that this was his right, and that the Catholic church and its clergy did not want him to know what they knew. He viewed the church as an intellectual oppressor, on one occasion exclaiming to a fellow villager, “Can't you understand, the inquisitors don't want us to know what they know!” He criticized the priests and the rich for their exclusivism and tyranny of knowledge. He regarded the use of Latin in legal and ecclesiastical settings as exploitative and dishonest. He rejected the church and its ceremonies as an intermediary between himself and God, saying that one might as well confess to a tree as to a priest. Menocchio claimed for himself the right to explore reality for himself and on his own terms, a right which the great humanists of the Renaissance had championed before him.
In addition to being an independent thinker, Menocchio valued the pursuit of truth for its own sake. He had an inquisitive and creative mind, and contentment with the status quo did not satisfy him. In this aspect as well, he was like the humanists who had lived before him.
Petrarch, again, was the personification of humanism in this respect. His ascent of Mount Ventoux was hardly an ordinary undertaking in the fourteenth century. According to his own description, he ascended the mountain purely to see what he could see atop the mountain. There was no practical reason why Petrarch would choose to do such a thing; indeed, as he was beginning his ascent, an old shepherd warned him against attempting the climb. Petrarch disregarded the warning, however, and carried on in his endeavor. He was determined to make his own way up the mountain, and no amount of cautionary advice would stop him.
Pico's Oration is also brimming with arguments for the pursuit of truth as an end in itself. Pico claims that this pursuit is what separates man from beasts. The pursuit of truth ennobles man, bridling his baser nature and elevating him to the level of cherubim. Pico also censures those who pursue philosophy for material benefit; in describing his own pursuit of knowledge, he writes: “I have never philosophized save for the sake of philosophy, nor have I ever desired or hoped to secure from my studies and my laborious researches any profit or fruit save cultivation of mind and knowledge of the truth.” Philosophy—the love of truth—was a noble pursuit in its own right.
Attendant to this idea of the value of truth for its own sake is the conviction that truth can stand on its own—that it need fear no challenge or questioning. For the humanists, there is no monopoly on truth. It can come from any source, and the greatest triumph of the intellectual lies in being proven wrong—or, in the words of Pico, “the real victory lies in being vanquished.” Pico argues that the true philosopher will read everything available to him in order to learn all that can be learned from each source. He draws on sources outside of the traditional, approved sphere of works, insisting that the truth has nothing to fear from inquiry.
This was the approach to truth that Menocchio took. He was not satisfied with the version of reality with which he was presented. He brought all the information that he had at his disposal to the table when it came to formulating his ideas about the universe. He read an astonishing variety of works for a man in his situation, ranging from the Bible to Il Fioretto della Bibbia (a collection of apocryphal gospels) to Boccaccio's Decameron. He may even have read the Koran. He used any and all books that he came upon to find information and inspiration for the development of his ideas.
According to those who knew him, Menocchio loved to argue. One witness at his first inquisitorial trial said that “he is always arguing with somebody about the faith just for the sake of arguing—even with the priest.” Menocchio was unusually willing to say what he thought and challenge authority, even if that authority held his life in its hands. A friend warned him not to talk too much at his trial, but Menocchio did not heed this advice and ended by telling his inquisitors enough about his heretical beliefs that he was executed after his second trial. The humanists may have advocated the free flow of ideas, but even on the cusp of the Enlightenment, the world was not entirely ready for it.
Lastly, humanism is a philosophy which emphasizes the importance of human life and experience, as opposed to an afterlife or a divine scheme of which mortal existence is an insignificant part. It is this life that matters, along with the happiness and suffering therein. This theme is omnipresent throughout the writings of the great humanists, and it is a cardinal element of Menocchio's philosophy.
Pico begins his Oration by asserting that after creating the world and everything in it, “the Divine Artificer still longed for some creature which might comprehend the meaning of so vast an achievement, which might be moved with love at its beauty and smitten with awe at its grandeur.” In other words, God wanted creatures that could think. Pico describes God speaking to Adam, informing him: “I have placed you at the very center of the world, so that from that vantage point you may with greater ease glance round about you on all that the world contains. We have made you . . . in order that you may, as the free and proud shaper of your own being, fashion yourself in the form you may prefer.” Man is neither worthless nor insignificant. He is an intelligent and self-directed being, capable of discerning truth and making decisions for himself.
This sentiment can also be found in the work of another great humanist, Erasmus of Rotterdam. In his tongue-in-cheek work The Praise of Folly, Folly personified as a goddess defends herself on the basis that she brings good to humanity: she says, “this only is to be a god, to help men.” As with Pico, this is a very human-centric view. Rather than advocating a stoic acceptance of one's lot in life in hope of a greater reward beyond the grave, Erasmus seems to be advocating the appreciation of this life, and he has created an imaginary deity who makes it her aim to improve human existence. Folly goes on to argue that it is she that facilitates the very inception of life, and brings the greatest joys of life to humanity.
Folly then goes on to censure the theologians and clergy for their fixation on inconsequential issues that have no direct connection to human happiness, such as “whether it was possible that Christ could have taken upon Him the likeness of a woman, or of the devil, or of an ass, or of a stone, or of a gourd; and then how that gourd should have preached, worked miracles, or been hung on the cross . . . .” They fixate on these issues even as the world with all its real problems and difficulties calls to them. To Erasmus, such esoteric concerns are of little import. Human life, human experience, human suffering and happiness, are all vastly more important.
This is Menocchio's worldview in a nutshell. He believed that it was more important to love one's neighbor than to love God, and that to trespass against the former was a graver sin than to blaspheme against the latter. This life and the people in it were more important to Menocchio than a god who seemed to him distant and impersonal. He argued that blasphemy was not a sin “because it only hurts oneself and not one's neighbor . . . if a father has several children, and one of them says 'damn my father,' the father may forgive him, but if this child breaks the head of someone else's child, he cannot pardon him so easily if he does not pay: therefore have I said that it is not sinful to blaspheme because it does not hurt anyone.” Menocchio was still religious, but his religiosity was of a decidedly practical, immediate, and even humanistic nature. God was not the most important fixture of religion for Menocchio—people were.
The humanism of Menocchio's philosophy found its culmination in his cosmogony—his conception of the origin and nature of deity and the universe. He used a very unique and memorable analogy to describe this cosmogony. He believed that before the world was, “all was chaos, that is, earth, air, water, and fire were mixed together . . . .” He did not believe that God had created the world, but that out of this chaos “a mass formed—just as cheese is made out of milk—and worms appeared in it, and these were the angels. The most holy majesty decreed that these should be God and the angels, and among that number of angels, there was also God, he too having been created out of that mass at that time.” In this view, God was just as much a part of the world as humans were. He used his analogy of cheese forming from milk and worms forming from rotting cheese to describe the development of a self-contained universe from primordial chaos to its present state.
In essence, Menocchio was a materialist. While he remained a theist, his conception of God was a materialist one—rather than an external creator figure, God was a product of the universe. Further, Menocchio's search for truth from various sources led him to some startling conclusions. Upon reading Mandeville's account of various peoples and their traditions, Menocchio says that he “got [his] opinion that when the body dies, the soul dies too, since out of many different kinds of nations, some believe in one way some in another.”
In a true humanist spirit, Menocchio insisted on rational, real-world explanations for phenomena. He rejected the virgin birth and the resurrection of Christ, believing instead that Christ was the natural son of Mary and St. Joseph, and the Christ had died on the cross. As previously discussed, he rejected supernatural explanations for the origins of the universe. His religiosity was of a curiously pragmatic nature, placing greater emphasis on humanity than on divinity. In short, Menocchio was an embodiment of Renaissance humanism, and of the kind of ideas that later led to the Enlightenment and to modern secularism.
After his first inquisition, Menocchio was imprisoned for two years and then released. In 1599, however, he was summoned again for a second inquisition. It seems that he had been unable to keep his ideas to himself, and word of his blasphemies found its way to the powers that be. He was convicted of heresy a second time and was sentenced to death.
Although Menocchio was sentenced to die for his humanism in the end, he and the other great humanists of the Renaissance left an enduring legacy that has profoundly influenced modern society. Religious freedom, the separation of church and state, democracy, and the scientific revolution were all direct outgrowths of the humanist epistemology—intellectual independence, belief in the autonomy of truth, and emphasis on the importance of humanity, life, and the world as we experience it in the present. Menocchio was living on the cusp of a new world. Recent technological advantages, most notably the printing press, were making dangerous ideas such as humanism available to the increasingly literate masses. Global exploration and colonial expansion were exposing Europeans to strange and diverse societies that challenged their most basic assumptions about reality and the universe. The world would never be the same again.
Menocchio was certainly a remarkable individual. He had unusual characteristics for a peasant miller in the sixteenth century. His ideas, while perhaps somewhat strange and undoubtedly heretical, were entirely his own. He read and was influenced by a variety of works, but ultimately his ideas were, as he described it, the product of his own “artful mind.” He was too outspoken for his own good, and this characteristic led to his demise. However, it is because of Menocchio's courage that we are aware of his existence and his ideas at all. And ultimately, it is this courage which is the ultimate defining characteristic of humanism. The courage to think, the courage to know, and the courage to speak—this is what makes a humanist.
