Wie aus Agon Antagonismus wird. Scholastisch-humanistische Grenzpolitik um 1500

Abstract

Today, there is hardly anybody who wholeheartedly accepts the master narrative of the scholastic-humanistic opposition as constitutive factor of learned life in the 15th and early 16th centuries. To assume that scholasticism and humanism were entangled in an epic battle means to follow uncritically the self-fashioning of the proponents of an emphatic humanism. But this view was not just caused by a false representation of reality. On the contrary, it was the result of border politics which aimed to reconfigure the field of learning by establishing an antagonism between scholasticism and humanism. The Reuchlin affair is a landmark in this process. What had started as a conflict on the question how to deal with Jewish books, was seized by the proponents of an emphatic humanism: They reframed the affair and exploited it to ban those men of learning who wanted to use humanistic as well as scholastic techniques and contents. In order to gain support, Reuchlin himself had alluded to this interpretation of events. But by exploiting the affair to create an antagonism between scholasticism and humanism, the humanists eclipsed Reuchlin's concern to use Jewish knowledge for the Christian tradition by promoting his Christian cabala.