Europe: A History (97 page)

The causes of the Renaissance were as deep as they were broad. They can be related to the growth of cities and of late medieval trade, to the rise of rich and powerful capitalist patrons, to technical progress which affected both economic and artistic life. But the source of spiritual developments must be sought above all in the spiritual sphere. Here, the malaise of the Church, and the despondency surrounding the Church’s traditional teaching, becomes the major factor. It is no accident that the roots of Renaissance and Reformation alike are found in the realm of ideas.

The New Learning of the fifteenth century possessed three novel features. One was the cultivation of long-neglected classical authors, especially those such as Cicero or Homer who had not attracted the medieval schoolmen. The second was the cultivation of ancient Greek as an essential partner to Latin. The third was the rise of biblical scholarship based on the critical study of the original Hebrew and Greek texts. This last activity provided an important bond between the secular Renaissance and the religious Reformation which was to place special emphasis on the authority of the Scriptures. Scholarly criticism of classical texts was growing rapidly long before the advent of printing. The lead, here again, had been given by Petrarch. He was emulated by Boccaccio, by Guarino, Filelfo, Bruni, Aurispa, and by that indefatigable collector and papal secretary G. F. Poggio Bracciolini (1380–1459). Poggio’s rival Lorenzo Valla (c.1406–57), was responsible both for the treatise
De Elegantiis Latinae Linguae
, which established the superiority of Ciceronian Latin, and for the exposure of the false Donation of Constantine. The Greek tradition, fostered by the Byzantine Manuel Chrysoloras (1355–1415) , sometime Professor of Greek at Florence, and by Angelo Poliziano (1454–94) poet and translator of Homer, was boosted by the wave of Greek refugees and their manuscripts after 1453. A later generation of scholars was dominated in Italy by the hellenist and orientalist G. Pico della Mirandola (1463–94), who explored the cabala, and by Marsilio Ficino (1433–99); in France by Jacques Lefevre d’Étaples (1455–1537) and Guillaume Budé (1467–1540); in Germany by the Hebraist Johann Reuchlin (1455–1522), by the wandering knight Ulrich von Hutten (1488–1523), and by Philip Melanchthon (1497–1560). Particularly relevant for the future of science was Ficino’s translation of the Alexandrian Hermes Trismegistus. The printing-machine made its entrée when the movement was well advanced,
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Enthusiastic circles of such ‘humanists’ sprang up at all points, from Oxford and Salamanca to Cracow and Lwów. Their patrons, from Cardinal Beaufort to Cardinal Oleśnicki, were often prominent churchmen. All, in their devotion to the ancients, would have echoed the
cri de coeur
of one of their lesser brethren, Cyriac of Ancona: ‘I go to wake the dead.’ All paid homage to the greatest of their number—Erasmus of Rotterdam.

Gerhard Gerhards (c.1466–1536), a Dutchman from Rotterdam better known by his Latin and Greek pen-names of ‘Desiderius’ and ‘Erasmus’, was the principal practitioner of Christian humanism. Scholar at Deventer, chorister at Utrecht, secretary to the Bishop of Cambrai, frequent visitor to London and Cambridge, and long-term resident of Basle, Erasmus ‘made himself the centre of the scientific study of Divinity… the touchstone of classical erudition and literary taste’.
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One of the first truly popular authors of the age of printing—his
Moriae Encomium
(Folly’s Praise of Folly, 1511) ran into 43 editions in his lifetime—he did more than anyone else to marry the new humanism with the Catholic tradition. His
Enchiridion Militis Christiani
(Handbook of a Christian Soldier, 1503) was another winner. Like his close friend Thomas More, he was no less a Pauline than a Platonist. His publication of the Greek
New Testament
(1516) was a landmark event. Its Preface contained the famous words:

I wish that every woman might read the Gospel and the Epistles of St Paul. Would that these were translated into every language … and understood not only by Scots and Irishmen but by Turks and Saracens. Would that the farmer might sing snatches of Scripture at his plough, that the weaver might hum phrases of Scripture to the tune of his shuttle …
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Most attractive, perhaps, was his beautifully paradoxical temperament. He was a priest with a strong streak of anticlericalism; a scholar with a deep loathing of pedantry; a royal and imperial pensioner who lacerated kings and princes; a true protestant against the abuses of the Church who took no part in the Reformation; a devoted humanist and a devoted Christian. His books remained on the Church’s Index for centuries but were freely printed in England, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. He sported both a gentle spirit of moderation and a savage wit. ‘What disasters would befall’, he asked of the Rome of Julius II, ‘if ever the supreme pontiffs, the Vicars of Christ, should make the attempt to imitate His life of poverty and toil?’ The answer was that ‘thousands of scribes, sycophants … muleteers … and pimps’ would become unemployed.
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‘Christ too’, he wrote to the outrage of the Inquisition, ‘was made something of a fool himself, in order to help the folly of mankind.’
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Erasmus greatly influenced the language of the age. His collection of annotated
Adagia
(1508) was the world’s first bestseller, bringing over 3,000 classical proverbs and phrases into popular circulation:

Humanism is a label given to the wider intellectual movement of which the New Learning was both precursor and catalyst. It was marked by a fundamental shift from the theocratic or God-centred world-view of the Middle Ages to the anthropocentric or man-centred view of the Renaissance. Its manifesto may be seen to have been written by Pico’s treatise
On the Dignity of Man;
and, in time, it diffused all branches of knowledge and art. It is credited with the concept of human personality, created by the new emphasis on the uniqueness and worth of individuals. It is credited with the birth of history, as the study of the processes of change, and hence of the notion of progress; and it is connected with the stirrings of science—that is, the principle that nothing should be taken as true unless it can be tried and demonstrated. In religious thought, it was a necessary precondition for Protestant emphasis on the individual conscience. In art it was accompanied by renewed interest in the human body and in the uniqueness of human faces. In politics it gave emphasis to the idea of the sovereign state as opposed to the community of Christendom, and hence to the beginnings of modern nationality. The sovereign nation-state is the collective counterpart of the autonomous human person,
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Both in its fondness for pagan antiquity and in its insistence on the exercise of man’s critical faculties, Renaissance humanism contradicted the prevailing modes and assumptions of Christian practice. Notwithstanding its intentions, traditionalists believed that it
was
destructive of religion, and ought to have been restrained. Five hundred years later, when the disintegration of Christendom was far more advanced, it has been seen by many Christian theologians as the source of all the rot. According to one Catholic philosopher:

The difference between the Renaissance and the Middle Ages was not a difference by addition but by subtraction. The Renaissance … was not the Middle Ages plus Man, but the Middle Ages minus God.

An American Protestant was no less forgiving: ‘The Renaissance is the real cradle of that very un-Christian concept: the autonomous individual.’ A Russian Orthodox was the most uncompromising of all:

Renaissance humanism affirmed the autonomy of man, and his freedom in the spheres of cultural creation, science and art. Herein lay its truth, for it was essential that the creative force of humanity should surmount the obstacles and prohibitions that mediaeval Christianity put in its way. Unfortunately, however, the Renaissance also began to assert man’s self-sufficiency, and to make a rift between him and the eternal truths of Christianity … Here we have the fountain-head of the tragedy of modern history…. God became the enemy of Man, and man the enemy of God.
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By the same token, many people in recent times who do not hide their contempt for Christianity—Marxists, scientific sociologists, and atheists among them—have welcomed the Renaissance as the beginning of Europe’s liberation. Nothing would have horrified the Renaissance masters more. Few of them saw any contradiction between their humanism and their religion; and most modern Christians would agree. All the developments deriving from the Renaissance,
from Cartesian rationalism to Darwinian science, have been judged by fundamentalists to be contrary to religion; yet Christianity has adapted, and has accommodated them. Left to itself, humanism will always find its logical destination in atheism. But mainstream European civilization did not follow that extreme road. Through all the conflicts which ensued, a new and ever-changing synthesis was found between faith and reason, tradition and innovation, convention and conviction. Despite the growing prominence of secular subjects, the overwhelming bulk of European art continued to be devoted to religious themes; and all the great masters were religious believers. Suitably enough, at the end of a long life, Michelangelo Buonarroti (1474–1564)—sculptor of the Florentine
David
(1504), painter of the Sistine Chapel, and architect of St Peter’s dome—turned for consolation to devotional poetry:

Giunto è già ‘l corso della vita mia,
con tempestoso mar per frágil barca,
al commun porto, ov’a render si varea
conto e ragion d’ogni’ opra trista e pia.
Onde l’affettuosa fantasia,
che l’arte me fece idol’ e monarca,
conosco or ben, com’era d’error carca,
e quel c’a mal suo grado ogn’uom desia.
Gli amorosi pensier, già vani e lieti,
che fien’or, s’a due morti m’avvicino?
D’una so ‘1 certo, e 1’ altra mi minaccia.
Né pinger né scolpir fía più che quieti
l’anima volta a quell’ Amor divino
c’aperse, a prender noi, ‘n croce le braccia.

(The course of my life has come, | by fragile ship through stormy seas, | to the common port, where one calls | to give account of all our evil and pious deeds. | Whence the fond fantasy, | which made Art my idol and monarch, | I now know to have been a cargo of error, | and see what every man desires to his own harm. | Those thoughts of love, once light and gay, | what of them if now two deaths beset me? | I know the certainty of one, whilst the other oppresses. | Nor painting nor sculpture brings real repose; | my soul turns to that love divine | which, to enfold us, opens its arms on the cross.)
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