implied in the substitution of the Copernican for the Ptolemaic system.
The world, regarded in old times as the centre of all things, the apple
of God's eye, for the sake of which were created sun and moon and stars,
suddenly was found to be one of the many balls that roll round a giant
sphere of light and heat, which is itself but one among innumerable
suns, attended each by a _cortège_ of planets, and scattered--how, we
know not--through infinity. What has become of that brazen seat of the
old gods, that paradise to which an ascending Deity might be caught up
through clouds, and hidden for a moment from the eyes of his disciples?
The demonstration of the simplest truths of astronomy destroyed at a
blow the legends that were most significant to the early Christians by
annihilating their symbolism. Well might the Church persecute Galileo
for his proof of the world's mobility. Instinctively she perceived that
in this one proposition was involved the principle of hostility to her
most cherished conceptions, to the very core of her mythology.
Science was born, and the warfare between scientific positivism and
religious metaphysics was declared. Henceforth God could not be
worshipped under the forms and idols of a sacerdotal fancy; a new
meaning had been given to the words "God is a Spirit, and they that
worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth." The reason of man
was at last able to study the scheme of the universe, of which he is a
part, and to ascertain the actual laws by which it is governed. Three
centuries and a half have elapsed since Copernicus revolutionized
astronomy. It is only by reflecting on the mass of knowledge we have
since acquired, knowledge not only infinitely curious, but also
incalculably useful in its application to the arts of life, and then
considering how much ground of this kind was acquired in the ten
centuries which preceded the Renaissance, that we are at all able to
estimate the expansive force which was then generated. Science, rescued
from the hands of astrology, geomancy, alchemy, began her real life with
the Renaissance. Since then, as far as to the present moment, she has
never ceased to grow. Progressive and durable, science may be called the
first-born of the spirit of the modern world.
Thus by the discovery of the world is meant on the one hand the
appropriation by civilized humanity of all corners of the habitable
world, and on the other the conquest by science of all that we now know
about the nature of the universe. In the discovery of man, again, it is
possible to trace a twofold process. Man in his temporal relations,
illustrated by pagan antiquity, and man in his spiritual relations,
illustrated by biblical antiquity: these are the two regions, at first
apparently distinct, afterward found to be interpenetrative, which the
critical and inquisitive genius of the Renaissance opened for
investigation. In the former of these regions we find two agencies at
work--art and scholarship. During the Middle Ages the plastic arts, like
philosophy, had degenerated into barren and meaningless scholasticism--a
frigid reproduction of lifeless forms copied technically and without
inspiration from debased patterns. Pictures became symbolically
connected with the religious feelings of the people, formulas from which
to deviate would be impious in the artist and confusing to the
worshipper. Superstitious reverence bound the painter to copy the almond
eyes and stiff joints of the saints whom he had adored from infancy;
and, even had it been otherwise, he lacked the skill to imitate the
natural forms he saw around him.
But with the dawning of the Renaissance a new spirit in the arts arose.
Men began to conceive that the human body is noble in itself and worthy
of patient study. The object of the artist then became to unite
devotional feeling and respect for the sacred legend with the utmost
beauty and the utmost fidelity of delineation. He studied from the nude;
he drew the body in every posture; he composed drapery, invented
attitudes, and adapted the action of his figures and the expression of
his faces to the subject he had chosen. In a word, he humanized the
altar-pieces and the cloister frescoes upon which he worked. In this way
the painters rose above the ancient symbols and brought heaven down to
earth. By drawing Madonna and her son like living human beings, by
dramatizing the Christian history, they silently substituted the love of
beauty and the interests of actual life for the principles of the
Church. The saint or angel became an occasion for the display of
physical perfection, and to introduce _un bel corpo ignudo_ into the
composition was of more moment to them than to represent the macerations
of the Magdalen. Men thus learned to look beyond the relique and the
host, and to forget the dogma in the lovely forms which gave it
expression. Finally, when the classics came to aid this work of
progress, a new world of thought and fancy, divinely charming, wholly
human, was revealed to their astonished eyes.
Thus art, which had begun by humanizing the legends of the Church,
diverted the attention of its students from the legend to the work of
beauty, and lastly, severing itself from the religious tradition, became
the exponent of the majesty and splendor of the human body. This final
emancipation of art from ecclesiastical trammels culminated in the great
age of Italian painting. Gazing at Michelangelo's prophets in the
Sistine Chapel, we are indeed in contact with ideas originally
religious. But the treatment of these ideas is purely, broadly human, on
a level with that of the sculpture of Phidias. Titian's "Virgin Received
into Heaven," soaring midway between the archangel who descends to crown
her and the apostles who yearn to follow her, is far less a Madonna
Assunta than the apotheosis of humanity conceived as a radiant mother.
Throughout the picture there is nothing ascetic, nothing mystic, nothing
devotional. Nor did the art of the Renaissance stop here. It went
further, and plunged into paganism. Sculptors and painters combined with
architects to cut the arts loose from their connection with the Church
by introducing a spirit and a sentiment alien to Christianity.
Through the instrumentality of art, and of all the ideas which art
introduced into daily life, the Renaissance wrought for the modern world
a real resurrection of the body which, since the destruction of the
pagan civilization, had lain swathed up in hair-shirts and cerements
within the tomb of the mediæval cloister. It was scholarship which
revealed to men the wealth of their own minds, the dignity of human
thought, the value of human speculation, the importance of human life
regarded as a thing apart from religious rules and dogmas. During the
Middle Ages a few students had possessed the poems of Vergil and the
prose of Boethius--and Vergil at Mantua, Boethius at Pavia, had actually
been honored as saints--together with fragments of Lucan, Ovid, Statius,
Cicero, and Horace. The Renaissance opened to the whole reading public
the treasure-houses of Greek and Latin literature. At the same time the
Bible, in its original tongues, was rediscovered. Mines of oriental
learning were laid bare for the students of the Jewish and Arabic
traditions. What we may call the Aryan and the Semitic revelations were
for the first time subjected to something like a critical comparison.
With unerring instinct the men of the Renaissance named the voluminous
subject-matter of scholarship _Litteræ Humaniores_ ("the more human
literature"), the literature that humanizes.
There are three stages in the history of scholarship during the
Renaissance. The first is the age of passionate desire. Petrarch poring
over a Homer he could not understand, and Boccaccio in his maturity
learning Greek, in order that he might drink from the well-head of
poetic inspiration, are the heroes of this period. They inspired the
Italians with a thirst for antique culture. Next comes the age of
acquisition and of libraries. Nicholas V, who founded the Vatican
Library in 1453, Cosmo de' Medici, who began the Medicean collection a
little earlier, and Poggio Bracciolini, who ransacked all the cities and
convents of Europe for manuscripts, together with the teachers of Greek,
who in the first half of the fifteenth century escaped from
Constantinople with precious freights of classic literature, are the
heroes of this second period. It was an age of accumulation, of
uncritical and indiscriminate enthusiasm. Manuscripts were worshipped by
these men, just as the reliques of the Holy Land had been adored by
their great-grandfathers. The eagerness of the crusades was revived in
this quest of the holy grail of ancient knowledge. Waifs and strays of
pagan authors were valued like precious gems, revelled in like
odoriferous and gorgeous flowers, consulted like oracles of God, gazed
on like the eyes of a beloved mistress. The good, the bad, and the
indifferent received an almost equal homage. Criticism had not yet
begun. The world was bent on gathering up its treasures, frantically
bewailing the lost books of Livy, the lost songs of Sappho--absorbing to
intoxication the strong wine of multitudinous thoughts and passions that
kept pouring from those long buried amphoræ of inspiration.
What is most remarkable about this age of scholarship is the enthusiasm
which pervaded all classes in Italy for antique culture. Popes and
princes, captains of adventure and peasants, noble ladies and the
leaders of the _demi-monde_ alike became scholars. There is a story told
by Infessura which illustrates the temper of the times with singular
felicity. On April 18, 1485, a report circulated in Rome that some
Lombard workmen had discovered a Roman sarcophagus while digging on the
Appian Way. It was a marble tomb, engraved with the inscription
"Julia, Daughter of Claudius," and inside the coffer lay the body of a
most beautiful girl of fifteen years, preserved by precious unguents
from corruption and the injury of time. The bloom of youth was still
upon her cheeks and lips; her eyes and mouth were half open; her long
hair floated round her shoulders. She was instantly removed--so goes the
legend--to the Capitol; and then began a procession of pilgrims from all
the quarters of Rome to gaze upon this saint of the old pagan world. In
the eyes of those enthusiastic worshippers, her beauty was beyond
imagination or description. She was far fairer than any woman of the
modern age could hope to be. At last Innocent VIII feared lest the
orthodox faith should suffer by this new cult of a heathen corpse. Julia
was buried secretly and at night by his direction, and naught remained
in the Capitol but her empty marble coffin. The tale, as told by
Infessura, is repeated in Matarazzo and in Nantiporto with slight
variations. One says that the girl's hair was yellow, another that it
was of the glossiest black. What foundation for the legend may really
have existed need not here be questioned. Let us rather use the _mythus_
as a parable of the ecstatic devotion which prompted the men of that age
to discover a form of unimaginable beauty in the tomb of the classic
world.
Then came the third age of scholarship--the age of the critics,
philologers, and printers. What had been collected by Poggio and Aurispa
had now to be explained by Ficino, Poliziano, and Erasmus. They began
their task by digesting and arranging the contents of the libraries.
There were then no short cuts of learning, no comprehensive lexicons, no
dictionaries of antiquities, no carefully prepared _thesauri_ of
mythology and history. Each student had to hold in his brain the whole
mass of classical erudition. The text and the canon of Homer, Plato,
Aristotle, and the tragedians had to be decided. Greek type had to be
struck. Florence, Venice, Basel, and Paris groaned with
printing-presses. The Aldi, the Stephani, and Froben toiled by night and
day, employing scores of scholars, men of supreme devotion and of mighty
brain, whose work it was to ascertain the right reading of sentences, to
accentuate, to punctuate, to commit to the press, and to place, beyond
the reach of monkish hatred or of envious time, that everlasting solace
of humanity which exists in the classics. All subsequent achievements in
the field of scholarship sink into insignificance beside the labors of
these men, who needed genius, enthusiasm, and the sympathy of Europe for
the accomplishment of their titanic task. Vergil was printed in 1470,
Homer in 1488, Aristotle in 1498, Plato in 1512. They then became the
inalienable heritage of mankind. But what vigils, what anxious
expenditure of thought, what agonies of doubt and expectation, were
endured by those heroes of humanizing scholarship, whom we are apt to
think of merely as pedants! Which of us now warms and thrills with
emotion at hearing the name of Aldus Manutius or of Henricus Stephanus
or of Johannes Froben? Yet this we surely ought to do; for to them we
owe in a great measure the freedom of our spirit, our stores of
intellectual enjoyment, our command of the past, our certainty of the
future of human culture.
This third age in the history of the Renaissance scholarship may be said
to have reached its climax in Erasmus; for by this time Italy had handed
on the torch of learning to the northern nations. The publication of his
_Adagia_ in 1500 marks the advent of a more critical and selective
spirit, which from that date onward has been gradually gaining strength
in the modern mind. Criticism, in the true sense of accurate testing and
sifting, is one of the points which distinguish the moderns from the
ancients; and criticism was developed by the process of assimilation,
comparison, and appropriation, which was necessary in the growth of
scholarship. The ultimate effect of this recovery of classic culture
was, once and for all, to liberate the intellect. The modern world was
brought into close contact with the free virility of the ancient world,
and emancipated from the thraldom of improved traditions. The force to
judge and the desire to create were generated. The immediate result in
the sixteenth century was an abrupt secession of the learned, not merely
from monasticism, but also from the true spirit of Christianity. The
minds of the Italians assimilated paganism. In their hatred of mediæval
ignorance, in their loathing of cowled and cloistered fools, they flew
to an extreme, and affected the manner of an irrevocable past. This
extravagance led of necessity to a reaction--in the North, of
Puritanism; in the South, to what has been termed the Counter-Reformation
effected under Spanish influences in the Latin Church. But Christianity,
that most precious possession of the modern world, was never seriously
imperilled by the classical enthusiasm of the Renaissance; nor, on the
other hand, was the progressive emancipation of the reason materially
retarded by the reaction it produced.
The transition at this point to the third branch in the discovery of
man, the revelation to the consciousness of its own spiritual freedom,
is natural. Not only did scholarship restore the classics and encourage
literary criticism; it also restored the text of the Bible, and
encouraged theological criticism. In the wake of theological freedom
followed a free philosophy, no longer subject to the dogmas of the
Church. To purge the Christian faith from false conceptions, to liberate
the conscience from the tyranny of priests, and to interpret religion to
the reason, has been the work of the last centuries; nor is this work as
yet by any means accomplished. On the one side, Descartes and Bacon and
Spinoza and Locke are sons of the Renaissance, champions of new-found
philosophical freedom; on the other side, Luther is a son of the
Renaissance, the herald of new-found religious freedom. The whole
movement of the Reformation is a phase in that accelerated action of the
modern mind which at its commencement we call the Renaissance. It is a
mistake to regard the Reformation as an isolated phenomenon, or as a
mere effort to restore the Church to purity. The Reformation exhibits,
in the region of religious thought and national politics, what the
Renaissance displays in the sphere of culture, art, and science--the
recovered energy and freedom of humanity. We are too apt to treat of
history in parcels, and to attempt to draw lessons from detached
chapters in the biography of the human race. To observe the connection
between the several stages of a progressive movement of the human
spirit, and to recognize that the forces at work are still active, is
the true philosophy of history.
The Reformation, like the revival of science and of culture, had its
mediæval anticipations and foreshadowings. The heretics whom the Church
successfully combated in North Italy, in France, and in Bohemia were the
precursors of Luther. The scholars prepared the way in the fifteenth
century. Teachers of Hebrew, founders of Hebrew type--Reuchlin in
Germany, Alexander in Paris, Von Hutten as a pamphleteer, and Erasmus as
a humanist--contribute each a definite momentum. Luther, for his part,
incarnates the spirit of revolt against tyrannical authority, urges the
necessity of a return to the essential truth of Christianity as
distinguished from the idols of the Church, and asserts the right of the
individual to judge, interpret, criticise, and construct opinion for
himself. The veil which the Church had interposed between humanity and
God was broken down. The freedom of the conscience was established. The
principles involved in what we call the Reformation were momentous.
Connected on the one side with scholarship and the study of texts, it
opened the path for modern biblical criticism. Connected on the other
side with intolerance of mere authority, it led to what has since been
named rationalism--the attempt to reconcile the religious tradition with
the reason, and to define the logical ideas that underlie the
conceptions of the popular religious conscience. Again, by promulgating
the doctrine of personal freedom, and by connecting itself with national
politics, the Reformation was linked historically to the Revolution. It
was the Puritan Church in England, stimulated by the patriotism of the
Dutch Protestants, which established our constitutional liberty and
introduced in America the general principle of the equality of men. This
high political abstraction, latent in Christianity, evolved by
criticism, and promulgated as a gospel in the second half of the
eighteenth century, was externalized in the French Revolution. The work
that yet remains to be accomplished for the modern world is the
organization of society in harmony with democratic principles.
Thus what the word Renaissance really means is new birth to liberty--the
spirit of mankind recovering consciousness and the power of
self-determination, recognizing the beauty of the outer world and of the
body through art, liberating the reason in science and the conscience in
religion, restoring culture to the intelligence, and establishing the
principle of political freedom. The Church was the schoolmaster of the
Middle Ages. Culture was the humanizing and refining influence of the
Renaissance. The problem for the present and the future is how, through
education, to render culture accessible to all--to break down that
barrier which in the Middle Ages was set between clerk and layman, and
which in the intermediate period has arisen between the intelligent and
ignorant classes. Whether the Utopia of a modern world in which all men
shall enjoy the same social, political, and intellectual advantages be
realized or not, we cannot doubt that the whole movement of humanity,
from the Renaissance onward, has tended in this direction. To destroy
the distinctions, mental and physical, which nature raises between
individuals, and which constitute an actual hierarchy, will always be
impossible. Yet it may happen that in the future no civilized man will
lack the opportunity of being physically and mentally the best that God
has made him.
It remains to speak of the instruments and mechanical inventions which
aided the emancipation of the spirit in the modern age. Discovered over
and over again, and offered at intervals to the human race at various
times and on divers soils, no effective use was made of these material
resources until the fifteenth century. The compass, discovered according
to tradition by Gioja of Naples in 1302, was employed by Columbus for
the voyage to America in 1492. The telescope, known to the Arabians in
the Middle Ages, and described by Roger Bacon in 1250, helped Copernicus
to prove the revolution of the earth in 1530, and Galileo to
substantiate his theory of the planetary system. Printing, after
numerous useless revelations to the world of its resources, became an
art in 1438; and paper, which had long been known to the Chinese, was
first made of cotton in Europe about 1000 and of rags in 1319. Gunpowder
entered into use about 1320. As employed by the Genius of the
Renaissance, each one of these inventions became a lever by means of
which to move the world. Gunpowder revolutionized the art of war. The
feudal castle, the armor of the knight and his battle-horse, the prowess
of one man against a hundred, and the pride of aristocratic cavalry
trampling upon ill-armed militia, were annihilated by the flashes of the
cannon. Courage became more a moral than a physical quality. The victory
was delivered to the brain of the general. Printing has established, as
indestructible, all knowledge, and disseminated, as the common property
of everyone, all thought; while paper has made the work of printing
cheap. Such reflections as these, however, are trite and must occur to
every mind. It is far more to the purpose to repeat that not the
inventions, but the intelligence that used them, the conscious
calculating spirit of the modern world, should rivet our attention when
we direct it to the phenomena of the Renaissance.
In the work of the Renaissance all the great nations of Europe shared.
But it must never be forgotten that, as a matter of history, the true
Renaissance began in Italy. It was there that the essential qualities
which distinguish the modern from the ancient and the mediæval world
were developed. Italy created that new spiritual atmosphere of culture
and of intellectual freedom which has been the life-breath of the
European races. As the Jews are called the chosen and peculiar people of
divine revelation, so may the Italians be called the chosen and peculiar
vessels of the prophecy of the Renaissance. In art, in scholarship, in
science, in the mediation between antique culture and the modern
intellect, they took the lead, handing to Germany and France and England
the restored humanities complete. Spain and England have since done more
for the exploration and colonization of the world. Germany achieved the
labor of the Reformation almost single-handed. France has collected,
centralized, and diffused intelligence with irresistible energy. But if
we return to the first origins of the Renaissance, we find that, at a
time when the rest of Europe was inert, Italy had already begun to
organize the various elements of the modern spirit, and to set the
fashion whereby the other great nations should learn and live.
THE BLACK DEATH RAVAGES EUROPE
A.D. 1348
J. F. C. HECKER[51] GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO
Different parts of the oriental world have been mentioned as
the probable locality of the first appearance of the plague
or pestilence known as the "black death," but its origin is
most generally referred to China, where, at all events, it
raged violently about 1333, when it was accompanied at its
outbreak by terrestrial and atmospheric phenomena of a
destructive character, such as are said to have attended the
first appearance of Asiatic cholera and other spreading and
deadly diseases; from which it has been conjectured that
through these convulsions deleterious foreign substances may
have been projected into the atmosphere.