NEXT TO the discovery of the New World, the recovery of the ancient
world is the second landmark that divides us from the Middle Ages and
marks the transition to modern life. The Renaissance signifies the
renewed study of Greek, and the consequences that ensued from it,
during the century and a half between Petrarca and Erasmus. It had
survived, as a living language, among Venetian colonists and
Calabrian monks, but exercised no influence on literature.
The movement was preceded by a Roman revival, which originated with
Rienzi. Rome had been abandoned by the Papacy, which had moved from
the Tiber to the Rhone, where it was governed by Frenchmen from
Cahors, and had fallen, like any servile country, into feudal hands.
Rienzi restored the Republic, revived the self-government of the city,
the memories attached to the Capitol, the inscriptions, the monuments
of the men who had ruled the world. The people, no longer great
through the Church, fell back on the greatness which they inherited
from ancient times. The spell by which the Tribune directed their
palm was archaeology. In front of the Capitoline temple, near the
Tapeian rock and the She Wolf's cave, he proclaimed their rights
over the empire and the nations; and he invited the people of Italy
to a national parliament for the restoration of Italian unity and of
the ancient glory and power of Rome. Patriotism, national
independence, popular liberty, all were founded on antiquarian studies
and the rhetorical interpretation of the fragments of the Lex Regia.
Thee political scheme of Rienzi failed, but it started a movement in
the world of thought deeper and more enduring than State transactions.
For his ideas were adopted by the greatest writer then living, and
were expounded by him in the most eloquent and gracious prose that had
been heard for a thousand years. Petrarca called the appearance of
the patriotic tribune and rhetorician the dawn of a new world and a
golden age. Like him, he desired to purge the soil of Italy from the
barbaric taint. It became the constant theme of the Humanists to
protest against the foreign intruder, that is, against the feudal
noble the essential type of the medieval policy. It is the link
between Rienzi, the dreamer of dreams, and the followers of Petrarca.
Bocaccio had already spoken of the acceptable blood of tyrants.
But the political influence of antiquity, visible at first, made way
for a purely literary influence. The desire for good Latin became
injurious to Italian, and Petrarca censured Dante for his error in
composing the Divine Comedy in the vulgar tongue. He even regretted
that the Decamerone was not written in Latin, and refused to read what
his friend had written for the level of uneducated men. The classics
became, in the first place, the model and the measure of style; and
the root of the Renaissance was the persuasion that a man who could
write like Cicero had an important advantage over a man who wrote like
Bartolus or William of Ockham; and that ideas radiant with beauty must
conquer ideas clouded over with dialectics. In this, there was an
immediate success. Petrarca and his imitators learnt to write
excellent Latin. Few of them had merit as original thinkers, and what
they did for erudition was done all over again, and incomparably
better, by the scholars who appeared after the tempest of the
Reformation had gone down. But they were excellent letter writers.
In hundreds of volumes, from Petrarca to Sadolet and Pole, we can
trace every idea and mark every throb. It was the first time that the
characters of men were exposed with analytic distinctness; the first
time indeed that character could be examined with accuracy and
certitude.
A new type of men began with Petrarca, men accustomed to
introspection, who selected their own ideals, and moulded their minds
to them. The medieval system could prepare him for death; but, seeing
the vicissitudes of fortune and the difficulties of life, he depended
on the intellectual treasures of the ancient world, on the whole mass
of accessible wisdom, to develop him all round. To men ignorant
of Greek, like the first generation of the Renaissance, the
fourteenth-century men, much in ancient philosophy was obscure. But
one system, that of the Stoics, they studied deeply, and understood,
for they had the works of Seneca. For men craving for self-help and
the complete training of the faculties, eager to escape from the fixed
types of medieval manhood, minted by authority, and taught to distrust
conscience, when it was their own, and to trust it only in others,
Seneca was an oracle. For he is the classic of mental discipline,
vigilant self-study, and the examination of conscience. It is under
these influences that the modern type of individual man took shape.
The action of religion, by reason of the divided Church, and the
hierarchy in partibus, was at a low point; and no age has been so
corrupt, so barbarous in the midst of culture. The finished
individual of the Renaissance, ready for emergencies equal to either
fortune, relying on nothing inherited, but on his own energy and
resource, began badly, little recking rights of others, little caring
for the sanctity of life.
Very early in the first or Latin phase of the revival, people
suspected that familiarity with the classics would lead to admiration
for paganism. Coluccio Salutato, who had been Florentine Secretary
from the time of Petrarca, and is a classical writer of Latin letters,
had to defend the new learning against the rising reproach of
irreligion; and the statue of Virgil was ignominiously removed from
the market-place of the town which his birth has made illustrious, as
a scandal to good men. Petrarca never became a Greek scholar. He
felt the defect. To write beautiful Latin was nothing, unless there
was more to say than men already knew. But the Latin classics were no
new discovery. The material increase of knowledge was quite
insufficient to complete the type of an accomplished man. The great
reservoir of ideas, of forgotten sciences, of neglected truth,
remained behind. Without that, men would continue to work at a
disadvantage, to fight in the dark, and could never fulfil the
possibilities of existence. What was impatiently felt as the medieval
eclipse came not from the loss of elegant Latin, but from the loss of
Greek. All that was implied in the intended resurrection of antiquity
depended on the revival of Greek studies. Because Petrarca possessed
the culture of his time beyond all men, he was before them all in
feeling what it needed most. Knowledge of truth, not casual and
partial, but as complete and certain as the remaining civilisation
admitted, would have to be abandoned, if Latin was still to be the
instrument and the limit. Then the new learning would not be strong
enough to break down the reliance on approved authors, the tyranny of
great names, the exclusiveness of schools. Neither rhetoric nor
poetry could deprive Aristotle and Peter Lombard, St. Augustine and
St. Thomas, of their supremacy, give them their position in the
incessant stream of thought, or reduce them beneath the law of
progress in the realm of knowledge.
The movement which Petrarca initiated implied the revival of a buried
world, the enrichment of society by the mass of things which the
western nations had allowed to drop, and of which medieval
civilisation was deprived. It meant the preference for Grecian
models, the supremacy of the schools of Athens, the inclusion of
science in literature, the elevation of Hippocrates and Archimedes to
a level with Terence and Quintilian, the reproduction of that Hellenic
culture which fought the giant fight of the fourth and fifth century
with the Councils and Fathers of the Church. That is why the Latin
restoration, which was the direct result of Petrarca's example, was
overwhelmed by the mightier change that followed, when a more perfect
instrument reached the hands of men passionately curious and yearning
for new things.
At first there was no way of acquiring the unknown tongue. But the
second generation of Humanists sat at the feet of Byzantine masters.
The first was Chrysoloras, who was sent to Italy on a political
mission and settled in 1397 as a teacher of his own language at
Florence. When he died, at the council of Constance, there were
Italian scholars who could read Greek MSS. As teachers were scarce,
adventurous men, such as Scarparia, Guarino, Aurispa, pursued their
studies at Constantinople. Filelfo remained there for seven years,
working in great libraries not yet profaned by the Turk. Before the
middle of the fifteenth century Italy was peopled with migratory
scholars, generally poor, and without fixed appointments, but able to
rouse enthusiasm when they offered Plato for Henry of Ghent, and
Thucydides for Vincent of Beauvais. By that time the superiority of
the new learning, even in its very fragmentary condition, was
irresistible.
Just then three events occurred which determined the triumph of the
Renaissance. The Emperor came over to the Council of Florence with a
number of bishops and divines. In the discussions that followed,
Greek scholars were in demand; and one Eastern prelate, Bessarion,
remained in Italy, became a cardinal, and did much for the study of
Plato and the termination of the long Aristotelian reign. His fine
collection of manuscripts was at the service of scholars, and is still
at their service, in St. Mark's library at Venice. The fall of
Constantinople drove several fugitives to seek a refuge in Italy, and
some brought their books with them, which were more scarce and more
needful than men. For by that time Greek studies were well
established, and suffered only from the extreme scarcity of
manuscripts. The third important event was the election of
Parentucelli, who became Pope Nicholas V. On that day the new
learning took possession of the Holy See, and Rome began to be
considered the capital of the Renaissance.
It was not in the nature of things that this should be. For the new
men, with their new instrument of intellectual power, invaded
territory which was occupied by the clergy. In the Middle Ages the
Church, that is to say, first the cloister, then the universities
founded under the protectorate of the Church, had the civilising of
society, and, apart from law, the monopoly of literature. That came
to an end when the clergy lost the superiority of knowledge, and had
to share their influence with profane laymen, trained in the classics,
and more familiar with pagan than with Christian writers. There was a
common presumption in favour of the new point of view, the larger
horizon, of opinions that were founded on classical as well as on
Christian material. The Humanists had an independent judgment and
could contemplate the world they lived in from outside, without
quitting it, standing apart from the customary ways. As Pater said:
"The human mind wins for itself a new kingdom of feeling and sensation
and thought, not opposed to, but only beyond and independent of the
spiritual system then actually realised."
This is one of many causes operating at the time to weaken the notion
of ecclesiastical control. It was the triumphant return of an exile,
with an uproarious popularity and a claim to compensation for arrears.
The enthusiasm of those who were the first to read Homer, and
Sophocles, and Plato grew into complaint against those by whose neglect
such treasures had been lost. Centuries of ignorance and barbarism
had been the consequence. There was not only a world of new ideas,
but of ideas that were not Christian, which the Christianity of the
West had discarded. They began to recover the lost power, and the
ages in which they had been unknown became the ages of darkness. As
they were also ages in which the Church had exerted supreme authority,
antagonism was not to be averted. The endeavour was not only to make
the range of men's thought more comprehensive, but to enrich it with
the rejected wisdom of paganism. Religion occupied a narrower space
in the new views of life than in those of Dante and the preceding
time. The sense of sinfulness was weaker among the Humanists, the
standard of virtue was lower; and this was common to the most
brilliant of the Italian prelates, such as Aeneas Sylvius, with the
king of the Renaissance, Erasmus himself.
Lorenzo Valla, the strongest of the Italian Humanists, is also the one
who best exhibits the magnitude of the change that was going on in the
minds of men. He had learnt to be a critic, and, what was more rare,
a historical critic. He wrote against the belief in the writings of
Dionysius the Areopagite, which was one of the fixed positions of
theology, then and long after. When the Greeks at the Council of
Florence declared themselves unacquainted with the Apostles' Creed,
Valla warned the Latins not to speak of it as an apostolic
composition. During a war between Rome and Naples, Valla, in the
Neapolitan service, attacked the Donation of Constantine as the basis
of the temporal power, and exhorted Pope Eugenius to abandon what was
a usurpation, and a usurpation founded on fraud. Formidable in all
the armour of the new learning, he did more than any other man to
spread the conviction that the favourite arguments of the clergy were
destined to go down before the better opinion of profane scholars.
Valla is also the link between Italy and Germany. His critical essay
on the New Testament in the Vulgate influenced Erasmus, who published
it in 1505. His tract against the Donation, as the title-deed of the
temporal sovereignty, was printed by Ulrich von Hutten, and spread
that belief that the Pope was an antichrist, which was afterwards an
important article of the Huguenot Church. He was also a forerunner of
the Reformation by his tract on the Freedom of the Will. This man,
who displayed so conspicuously the resentful and iconoclastic spirit,
the religious scepticism, the moral indifference, the aversion for the
papal sovereignty, the contempt for the laws and politics of
feudalism, the hope and expectation of a mighty change, was an
official in the Pope's household.
After the discussion with the Greeks at Florence it was clear to all
men that there was a deeper issue than the revival of classical
learning, that there was a Christian as well as a pagan antiquity, and
that the knowledge of the early Church depended on Greek writings, and
was as essential a part of the Renaissance as the study of Homer or of
Pindar. The inference was drawn by Nicholas V, the first Renaissance
pontiff. He recognised the fact that a divine in full possession of
Hellenic literature would be a more competent defender of tradition, a
better writer, a stronger disputant, than the long line of scholastic
teachers. He saw that it would be the means of renovating theology
and disclosing the authentic and necessary evidences of historical
religion. The most enlightened ecclesiastics of that age understood
but vaguely that there was not only benefit and enrichment in a policy
that favoured the new learning, but the only possible escape from a
serious danger.
Religious knowledge in those days suffered not only from ignorance and
the defect of testimony, but from an excess of fiction and
falsification. Whenever a school was lacking in proofs for its
opinions, it straightway forged them, and was sure not to be found
out. A vast mass of literature arose, which no man, with medieval
implements, could detect, and effectually baffled and deceived the
student of tradition. At every point he was confronted by imaginary
canons and constitutions of the apostles, acts of Councils, decretals
of early Popes, writings of the Fathers from St. Clement to St. Cyril,
all of them composed for the purpose of deceiving.
The example of Lorenzo Valla made it certain that all this was about
to be exposed. The process that began with him lasted for two
centuries, to the patriarchs of authentic erudition, Ussher and
Pearson, Blondel and Launoy, the Bollandists of Antwerp and the
Benedictines of Saint-Maur. It became apparent that the divines of
many ages had been remarkable for their incapacity to find out
falsehood, and for their dexterity in propagating it, and it made no
little difference whether this tremendous exposure should be made by
enemies, and should constitute one series of disasters for religion.
This was prevented by the resolve of Pope Nicholas, that the Holy See
should sanction and encourage the movement with its influence, its
immense patronage, and all its opportunities. Therefore Valla, who
had narrowly escaped alive from the Inquisition, became a functionary
at the Vatican, and received 500 ducats from the Pope to translate
Thucydides. Scholars were attracted by the papal collection of 5000
manuscripts, which were the foundation of the Vatican library, the
first in the world after the fall of Constantinople.
The alliance between renovated Hellenism and the Papacy was ratified a
few years later, when the most intelligent of the Italian Humanists,
Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini of Siena, was raised to the throne under
the name of Pius II, and became the most modern of medieval Popes. He
was one of those Churchmen in whom the classical spirit of the time
predominated over the ecclesiastical. Twice there was a breach, and a
momentary reaction; but on the whole the contract was observed, and
the ancient pagans made their way under the shadow of St. Peter's
better than the early Christians. Humanists of the type of Valla were
domesticated by the prizes held out to them, from the pen of the
secretary to the tiara of the pontiff. The apprehended explosion
never came; the good and evil that was in the new scholars penetrated
the court and modified its tone. Bibbiena's comedies were applauded
at the Belvedere; The Prince was published by the Pope's printer, with
the Pope's permission; a cardinal shrank from reading St. Paul, for
fear of spoiling his style; and the scandals in the family of Borgia
did not prevent bishops from calling him a god. Calixtus III said
that he feared nothing from any hostile Powers, for he had 3000 men of
letters to rely on. His successor, Aeneas Sylvius, considered that
the decline of the empire was due to the fact that scholarship had
gone over to the Papacy. The main fact in the Italian Renaissance is
that an open conflict was averted at the cost of admitting into the
hierarchy something of the profane spirit of the new men, who were
innovators but not reformers. Ficino declares that there was no place
where liberty prevailed as it did at Rome. Poggio, the mocking
adversary of the clergy, was for half a century in the service of the
Popes. Filelfo was handsomely rewarded by Nicholas for satires which
would now be considered scarcely fit for publication. Aeneas Sylvius
laughed at the Donation of Constantine, and wrote an account of his
own Conclave in the tone of a fin de siecle journalist. He is indeed
the founder of freedom of speech in History. When his History of his
own time was published, a great number of passages injurious to his
countrymen and to his ecclesiastical brethren had to be suppressed.
They have been printed lately, and contain, in fifty pages, the
concentrated essence of the wickedness of Italy. Platina wrote an
angry and vindictive History of the Popes, and presented it to Sixtus
IV, who made him librarian of the Vatican. Erasmus, who had a sort of
clerical bias, warmly extols the light and liberty which he found at
Rome in 1515, at the very eve of the Reformation.
There were branches of classical philology in which the Renaissance
was backward. The general purpose was to set up Plato in the place of
Aristotle, discredited as as accomplice of the obscurest schoolmen.
Under the Medici, a Platonic academy flourished at Florence, with
Ficino and Politian at its head. But there was a tendency to merge
Plato in Neoplatonism, and to bridge over what separated him from
Christianity. Neither the knowledge of Plato, nor the knowledge of
the Gospel, profited by the endeavour. The only branch of literature
in which the Renaissance gave birth to real classics, equal to the
ancients, was politics. The medieval theory of politics restrained
the State in the interest of the moral law of the Church, and of the
individual. Laws are made for the public good, and, for the public
good, they may be suspended. The public good is not to be considered,
if it is purchased at the expense of an individual. Authorities are
legitimate if they govern well. Whether they do govern well those
whom they govern must decide. The unwritten laws reigns supreme over
the municipal law. Modern sentiments such as these could not be
sustained in the presence of indifference to religion, uncertainty as
to another world, impatience of the past, and familiarity with
Hellenistic thought. As the Church declined the ancient State
appeared, a State which knew no Church, and was the greatest force on
earth, bound by no code, a law to itself. As there is no such thing
as right, politics are an affair of might, a mere struggle for power.
Such was the doctrine which Venice practised, in the interest of a
glorious and beneficent government, and which two illustrious writers,
Machiavelli and Guicciardini, made the law of modern societies.
The one thing common to the whole Italian Renaissance was the worship
of beauty. It was the aesthetic against the ascetic. In this
exclusive study, that is, in art, the Italians speedily attained the
highest perfection that has been reached by man. And it was reached
almost simultaneously in many parts of Italy, Rome, Florence, Milan,
and Venice. First, it was the triumph of classical over medieval
models, and the suppression of Gothic. Then it was the outbreak of
modern painting, beyond all models, medieval or ancient, in a
generation of men remarkable for originality. Rome, which had adopted
the new learning under the impulse of Nicholas V, went over also to
the new art and became its metropolis. It was the ripest and most
brilliant work of the time, and it was employed to give expression to
religious ideas, and to decorate and exalt the dignity of the Papacy,
with its headquarters at the Vatican. The man who conceived how much
might be done by renascent art to give splendour to the Church at the
moment when its terrestrial limits were immeasurably extended, and its
political power newly established, was Julius II. In 1505 Emmanuel of
Portugal, inspired by the prodigies of that epoch of discovery, and by
the language of recent canonists, addressed him in these terms
"Receive, at last, the entire globe, thou who art our god."
Julius, who, by the energy of his will and his passion for posthumous
fame, was the true son of the Renaissance, asked Michael Angelo to
construct a monument worthy of a pontiff who should surpass all his
predecessors in glory. When the design proved too gigantic for any
existing Church, he commanded Bramante to pull down the Basilica of
Constantine, which for a thousand years had witnessed the dramatic
scenes of ecclesiastical history, the coronation of Charlemagne, the
enthronement of the dead Formosus, the arrest of Paschal, and to erect
in its place a new and glorified St. Peter's, far exceeding all the
churches of the universe in its dimensions, in beauty, in power over
the imagination of men. The ruthless destruction indicates the tone
of the new era. Old St. Peter's was not only a monument of history,
but a sepulchre of saints.
Julius was not inspired by the Middle Ages. Under him the Papacy was
preparing for a new career, less spiritual than what once had been,
more politic and secular and splendid, under new stars. He had
Bramante, Michael Angelo, Rafael, San Gallo, Peruzzi, a concentration
of artistic genius such as had never been, not produced by Rome
itself, but attracted from every quarter by the master of Rome. What
had been, one hundred years before, a neglected provincial town,
became the centre of European civilisation by the action of the Popes,
and principally of one ambitious Pope. The Vatican paintings were
largely political, commemorating the sovereign more than the priest,
until St. Peter's was designed to exhibit the sublime grandeur and
unity of the universal Church, and the authority of its head upon
earth. It was the crowning triumph of the Renaissance. When he was
dying, Julius said that the masses are impressed not by what they
know, but by what they see. He transmitted to his successors the
conception of a Church to be the radiant centre of religion and of art
for mankind; and we shall see that this was, after all, a disastrous
legacy.
The Renaissance, which was at its height in Italy after the middle of
the fifteenth century, was checked by the wars of Charles V, the siege
of Rome, and the Spanish domination. Toward 1540 Paolo Giovio says
that scholarship had migrated from the Italians to the Germans; and
the most learned Italian of the next generation, Baronius, knew no
Greek. Before its decline in Italy it had found new homes beyond the
Alps, especially in Germany. The Germans adopted the new learning
much later, near a century later than the Italians, when an occasional
student, such as Agricola and Reuchlin, visited Bologna or Rome. It
spread slowly. Of the seventeen universities, some, such as at
Vienna, Heidelberg, Erfurt, admitted the new studies; others, like
Cologne, resisted. There was not the patriotic sentiment, the
national enthusiasm. It was the importation of a foreign element, the
setting up of an old enemy, the restoration of a world the Germans,
under Alaric and Theodoric, had overthrown. They began with the
invention of printing, which exactly coincided with the fall of
Constantinople, as the earliest specimens of print are indulgences for
the Turkish war. This gave assurance that the work of the Renaissance
would last, that what was written would be accessible to all, that
such an occultation of knowledge and ideas as had depressed the Middle
Ages would never recur, that not an idea would be lost. They got
their classics generally from Italy; but after Aldus had published his
series of ancient writers, still treasured by those whom Greek
contractions do not repel, the New Testament and the Fathers, edited
by Erasmus, were printed at Bale by Froben and Amerbach.
The pagan spirit, the impatience of Christianity, appears only in one
or two Germans, such as Mutianus Rufus, who kept his convictions to
himself. There were no great theologians, but there was the greatest
religious writer that ever lived, the author of the Imitation, and he
was not a solitary thinker, but a member of a congregation which kept
religion alive, especially in North Germany. The opposition which
arose was stronger and more defined than anything in Italy, but it was
against Catholicism, not against Christianity.
The only matter in which German philology surpassed Italian was
science. The man who turned the course of the new learning into those
channels was Johannes Muller of Konigsberg, near Coburg, therefore
known as Monteregio; as Regiomontanus Bessarion gave him a MS. of
Ptolemy, and he designed a scheme to print the whole body of Greek
mathematicians. His Ephemerides are the origin of the Nautical
Almanack, and enabled Columbus and Vasco and Vespucci to sail the high
seas; and Nuremberg, where he lived, became the chief seat of the
manufacture of nautical instruments. He was made a bishop, and
summoned to Rome to reform the calendar. There was one Italian who
possessed the scientific spirit, without help from books, by the
prerogative of genius; that was Leonardo da Vinci. But he confided
his thoughts to diaries and remained unknown and useless in his time.
The conflict between the new learning and the old, which was repressed
in Italy by the policy of Rome, broke out in Germany, where it was
provoked by the study of Hebrew, not of Greek. At Rome in 1482 a
German student translated a passage of Thucydides so well that the
lecturer complained that Greece was settling beyond the Alps. It was
the first time that the rivalry appeared. That student was Reuchlin.
His classical accomplishments alone would not have made his name one
of the most conspicuous in literary history; but in 1490 Pico della
Mirandola expounded to him the wonders of oriental learning, and
Reuchlin, having found a Rabbi at Linz, began to study Hebrew in 1492.
His path was beset with difficulties, for there were no books in that
language to be found in all Germany. Reuchlin drew his supply from
Italy, and was the first German who read the Cabbala. He shared many
popular prejudices against the Jews, and read their books to help him
with the Old Testament, as he read Greek to help him with the New. He
had none of the grace, the dexterity, the passion, of the Humanists,
and very little of their enthusiasm for the classics. He preferred
Gregory Nazianzen to Homer. Savonarola shocked him by his opposition
to Alexander VI. His writings had little scientific value, but he was
a pioneer, and he prized the new learning for the sake of religion.
Therefore, when he was summoned to give an opinion on the suppression
of Jewish books, he opposed it, and insisted on the biblical knowledge
and the religious ideas to be found in them. Divines, he said, would
not have made so many mistakes if they had attended to the Jewish
commentators.
At that time persecution was raging against the Jews in the Peninsula.
They had always had enemies in the German towns, and in July 1510,
thirty-eight Jews were executed at Berlin. This intolerant spirit
began, in 1507, to be directed against their books. None were printed
in Germany until 1516; but from 1480 they had Hebrew presses in Italy,
at Naples, Mantua, Soncino, and at Constantinople. If their study was
encouraged while the printing was permitted, the Jews would become a
power such as they never were before printing began, and when none but
a few divines could read Hebrew. The movement in favour of destroying
them had its home at Cologne, with Hochstraten, the Inquisitor;
Gratius, a good scholar, whose work, known as Brown's Fasciculus, is
in the hands of every medieval student; and Pfefferkorn, who had the
zeal of a recently converted Jew. In his anxiety to bring over his
former brethren he desired to deprive them of their books. He would
allow them to retain only the Old Testament, without their
commentaries. He would compel them to hear Christian sermons. By
degrees he urged that they should be expelled, and at last that they
should be exterminated.
Maximilian, the emperor, turned with every wind. Reuchlin, the
defender of toleration, was attacked by Pfefferkorn, as a sceptic and
a traitor, and was accused before the ecclesiastical court. In 1514
the Bishop of Spires, acting for the Pope, acquitted Reuchlin; the
sentence was confirmed at Rome in 1516, and the Dominicans, who were
plaintiffs, agreed to pay the costs. Nevertheless they appealed, and
in 1520 Rome reversed the previous judgment and condemned Reuchlin.
In the midst of greater things the sentence escaped attention, and was
only brought to light by a scholar who is still living. But in the
meantime the Humanists had taken up the cause of Reuchlin, and the
result had been disastrous for the Dominicans. They had not directly
assailed the new learning, but their attack on the study of Hebrew had
been the most crass exhibition of retrograde spirit. If Jews were not
allowed to read Jewish books, such as Maimonides, to whom St. Thomas
owes so much, how could Christians be allowed to read pagan classics,
with their highly immoral gods and goddesses?
The golden opportunity of making intolerance ridiculous could not be
neglected. In the summer of 1515 a volume appeared purporting to
contain letters to Ortwin Gratius; and it was followed two years later
by another. With some good satire and some amusing caricature, they
also contained much personal insult and calumny. The wit is not
enough to carry on the joke through 108 letters, carefully composed in
Teutonic dog Latin by the best Latinists north of the Brenner.
Erasmus, who was diverted at first, afterwards turned away with
disgust, and Luther called the authors buffoons. The main writer of
the first volume was Crotus Rubianus, and of the other, Hutten.
Reuchlin himself disapproved. But he shared in the victory, which was
so brilliant that his condemnation by Rome passed without notice, and
it was not till our day that the success of the despised Pfefferkorn
became known to the world. It was the first effective appeal to
opinion against constituted authority, and the most decisive
demonstration of the power of the press. And it gave the Humanists
occasion so to define the issue that all could understand, in spite of
the reserve of Erasmus and of Reuchlin himself.
Erasmus Rogers, the greatest figure in the Renaissance, was born at
Rotterdam and brought up in extreme poverty, and he was a
valetudinarian and an invalid in consequence of early privation. He
lived in France and Belgium, in England and Italy, in Switzerland and
Germany, so that each country contributed to his development, and none
set its stamp upon him. He was eminently an international character;
and was the first European who lived in intimacy with other ages
besides his own, and could appreciate the gradual ripening and
enlargement of ideas. He devoted himself on equal terms to classical
and to Christian antiquity, and drew from both alike the same lessons
of morality and wisdom; for he valued doctrine chiefly for the sake of
a good life and a happy death, and was impatient of subtle dialectics
and speculative disputations. With so much of Renaissance studies as
did not serve the good estate of souls he showed little sympathy, and
was indifferent to art, to metaphysics, to antiquarian pedantry. He
endeavoured to make men familiar with the wisdom of the ancients by a
collection of 1451 adages selected from their works. His Colloquies,
the most popular book of his age, sold in 24,000 copies. At first he
was more a scholar than a divine; and though he learnt Greek late, and
was never a first-rate Hellenist, published editions of the classics.
In later life the affairs of religion absorbed him, and he lived for
the idea that reform of the Church depended on a better knowledge of
early Christianity, in other words, on better self-knowledge, which
could only result from a slow and prolonged literary process. He
started from the beginning by his edition of the Greek Testament,
begun here, at Queens' in 1512, published at Bale by Froben in 1516.
It had already been printed from better MSS. by Cardinal Ximenes in
the fifth volume of the Complutensian Polyglot, which did not appear
until 1522. Therefore Erasmus's edition is the first ever
published. It was produced at last, in a hurry, to secure the
priority, and was not greatly improved afterwards. Part of the
Apocalypse was wanting in all his MSS. He restored it by translating
it into Greek from the Vulgate, and in six verses made thirty
mistakes. His second edition had a letter of approbation from Leo X,
and it was the edition which Luther used for his translation. It is a
sign of the want of religious interest in the Renaissance, especially
in Italy, that printing had been going on for sixty years, and 24,000
works issued from the press, some of them more than a hundred times,
before anybody thought of the Greek Testament.
Erasmus occupied his later years with the works of the Fathers, also
printed by Froben, the Greeks in Latin translations. "Letters," he
said, "had remained Pagan in Italy, until he taught them to speak of
Christ." Just as he was entirely destitute of the national fibre, so
too he stood apart from the schools or currents of his time. His
striving was to replace the scholastics by the Fathers, systematic
theology by spiritual religion; and those Doctors of the Church who
inclined to system, such as St. Augustine, repelled him. It may be
said that he was not attracted by St. Paul, and preferred the Gospels
to the Epistles. He esteemed Seneca more highly than many Christian
divines. Although he chose to employ the weapon of irony, and
abstained from the high horse and the big word, he was earnest in his
desire for the reform of abuses in the Church. He disliked
contention, and desired to avoid offence; but he made enemies in all
parts of Europe, and was vehemently denounced by the theologians of
Paris and Louvain, by the Spanish friars, by Archbishop Lee, by
Zuniga, the Count of Carpi, and especially by the very learned
Steuchus of Gubbio. In later days he was one of the first writers put
on the Index. But throughout his career as a divine, that is, for the
last quarter of a century that he lived, he was consistently
protected, defended, consulted by Popes, until Paul III offered him a
Cardinal's hat and desired that he would settle at Rome. He told Leo X
that he thought it a mistake to censure Luther, with whom he agreed as
to many of the matters calling for reform. But whilst Luther
attributed the prevailing demoralisation to false dogmas and a faulty
constitution, Erasmus sought the cause in ignorance and
misgovernment. What came from this division of opinion pertains to the
next lecture. Erasmus belonged, intellectually, to a later and more
scientific or rational age. The work which he had initiated, and which
was interrupted by the Reformation troubles, was resumed at a more
acceptable time by the scholarship of the seventeenth century.