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Kenneth Burke, Harold Bloom and especially Northrup Frye in his Anatomy of Criticism. This definition of irony describes a poet’s recognition of incongruities and his controlled acceptance of them, or in Frye’s words, that irony “takes life exactly as it finds it.” Irony, in this case, is the understanding that life is paradoxical and then dwelling fully in that paradoxical state. As a social and intellectual movement, the Renaissance itself is ironically situated between the bookends of Medieval Scholasticism and Enlightenment Liberalism. It continues elements of the great system that precedes it as it looks forward to the great system that follows. I would argue that this irony is an, or even the, essential characteristic of the Renaissance and is the contributing factor in the energy and life of so much of Renaissance culture. After all, this is a culture which, under the auspices of education, produces the seeming hard-nosed realism of Machiavelli’s The Prince and the idealistic civilization of Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier. The question I would pose, and seek to answer, is what role this type of irony plays in the education of a Christian. In particular, I want to explore the Renaissance idea of Christian humanism and suggest what this term may mean for the future. As I teach at Houston Baptist University, a school dedicated to bringing Athens and Jerusalem together, it is (to use the prayer book’s language) “meet and right so to do.” n the Renaissance, Christian humanism refers to the reaffirmation of man’s creation in the image of God. Christian humanism, as represented by figures such as Pico della Mirandola, Erasmus, and Thomas Moore reevaluated the medieval focus on mankind’s fallen nature. Here is Pico’s estimation of Man in his Oration on the Dignity of Man:
that man is the intermediary between creatures, that he is the familiar of the gods above him as he is lord of the beings beneath him; that, by the acuteness of his senses, the inquiry of his reason and the light of his intelligence, he is the interpreter of nature, set midway between the timeless unchanging and the flux of time; the living union (as the Persians say), the very marriage hymn of the world, and, by David’s testimony but little lower than the angels.
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