P.O. Kristeller sobre o historiador e o Renascimento

O parágrafo final do artigo Humanism and Scholasticism in the Italian Renaissance de Paul Oskar Kristeller (publicado em "Renaissance Thought", 1961) é memorável. É mais "quente", claro, para quem o encontra no final da leitura completa do artigo; mas, como toca em aspectos importantes do ofício do historiador, vale a pena registrá-lo mesmo assim.

“Modern scholarship has been far too much influenced by all kinds of prejudices, against the use of Latin, against scholasticism, against the medieval church, and also by the unwarranted effort to read later developments, such as the German Reformation, or French Libertinism, or nineteenth-century liberalism or nationalism, back into the Renaissance. The only way to understand the Renaissance is a direct and, possibly, and objective study of the original sources. We have no real no real justification to take sides in the controversies of the Renaissance, and to play humanism against scholasticism, or scholasticism against humanism, or modern science against both of them. Instead of trying to reduce everything to one or two issues, which is the privilege and curse of political controversy, we should try to develop a kind of historical pluralism. It is easy to praise everything in the past which happens to resemble certain favorite ideas of our own time, or to ridicule and minimize everything that disagrees with them. This method is neither fair nor helpful for an adequate understanding of the past. It is equally easy to indulge in a sort of worship of success, and to dismiss defeated and refuted ideas with a shrugging of the shoulders, but just as in political history, this method does justice neither to the vanquished nor the victors. Instead of blaming each century for not having anticipated the achievements of the next, intellectual history must patiently register the errors of the past as well as its truths. Complete objectivity may be impossible to achieve, but it should remain the permanent aim and standard of the historian as well as of the philosopher and scientists.”