Christian Schools and Scholars / or, Sketches of Education from the Christian Era to the Council of Trent

by Augusta Theodosia Drane

But the palm of Christian scholarship belongs, at this time, beyond all question, to John Picus, Prince of Mirandola, whose brief life closed in his thirty-second year, and whose acquirements probably surpassed those recorded of any other scholar. Whilst still a child he evinced so retentive a memory as to be able at once to repeat any verses recited in his presence, and displayed a sort of natural predisposition to the study of the belles-lettres. His mother, however, who wished him to embrace the ecclesiastical state, sent him to Bologna, to read canon law, at the age of fourteen, and after spending two years there, he proceeded to study philosophy in the principal schools of France and Italy. Besides a knowledge of the scholastic writers, he acquired during the next six years the Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and Chaldaic tongues; but his enthusiastic and imaginative disposition led him to explore with eagerness the mysteries of the Jewish Cabala, a mass of mystic doctrine attributed to Esdras; on which idle fallacies, says Corniani, Mirandola expended a genius which was fitted to reach the most elevated truths of philosophy.

In his twenty-third year the young scholar appeared at Rome, and astonished the learned world by offering publicly to defend nine hundred theses on questions logical, ethical, mathematical, physical, metaphysical, theological, magical, and cabalistic; in short, de omni re scibili. Four hundred of these propositions were taken from Latin, Greek, Jewish, and Arabic doctors; the rest were announced to be his own opinions, which he was prepared to defend, subject to the judgment of the Church. There was a dash of vanity in all this, excusable perhaps in so young a scholar, who could not but be conscious of his superiority, and who in his anxiety to display it, offered to pay the expenses of any learned man who might come to oppose him from the utmost parts of the earth. His propositions were meanwhile examined by order of Innocent VIII., and thirteen of them pronounced unsound; whereupon he published an “Apology,” explaining in what sense they were put forth, but wholly submitting to the judgment passed on them by authority. The Holy Father, therefore, while condemning the theses, forbade their author to be in any way molested, and when some of his enemies revived these accusations on the death of Innocent, his successor, Alexander VI., appointed a commission, which declared his innocence of the charge of heresy. He next appeared at Florence, the most brilliant of all the brilliant throng that was gathered in the court of Lorenzo de’ Medici, and was admitted to the closest friendship of that prince, and his favourite scholars Ficinus and Politian. Young, gifted in mind and person, and possessed of all the fairy favours of rank, wealth, and an honourable fame, Picus of Mirandola yielded at first to the fascinations of the world, which perhaps never assumed a more bewitching guise than in the court of the Medici. His ardent poetic temperament was sensitively alive to the seductions of pleasure, when pleasure came hand in hand with all that was graceful in art and polished in literature. But a few years of such life sufficed to withdraw the veil from his eyes; the pursuit after worldly honours and delights seemed after all, to use his own words, but a child’s chase after painted soap-bubbles; and the day came when, flinging all his lighter poetry into the flames, he prostrated before the altar of the Blessed Virgin, and vowed to dedicate the remainder of his life to the service of God alone. From that time he became as remarkable for his admirable virtues, as he had been before for his learning; his charities to the poor were dispensed on a princely scale, and so great a horror did he conceive for the vain glory into which he had been once betrayed, that he only allowed his writings to appear under the name of some other author. He refused every solicitation to engage in public disputations, and spent the remainder of his days in mingled prayer and study, to which latter exercise, says Paul Cortese, he generally devoted twelve hours a day.

It is remarkable that Picus of Mirandola, though so thoroughly imbued with the literary tastes of the Renaissance, was very far from sharing in that contempt for the elder Christian schoolmen, in which the scholars of the fifteenth century commonly indulged. When Hermolaus Barbarus, in one of his letters, gave vent to his sentiments of scorn for men who could write such bad Latin, Picus replied in an epistle, which Hallam quotes as affording a favourable example of the ease and elegance of his own style, and in which he puts a very good defence in the mouth of those despised barbarians; and Hermolaus had nothing better to say in return than that they would certainly have disowned their advocate for defending them in such classical language.

But we must now enter the school of another Florentine canon, who had the merit not only of being learned in Greek and Latin, but of possessing some of that original and poetic genius which, since the days of Petrarch, had been rare in Italy, overlaid, it may be, by the superincumbent weight of grammar learning. Angelo Politian had first made himself known to the world of letters by a graceful poem, composed when a mere youth on the occasion of a tournament, at which Julian and Lorenzo, the two sons of Pietro de’ Medici, appeared in the lists. The young poet, scarce fifteen years of age, was at once received into the Medici Palace, and astonished his tutors, Landino, Argyrophilus, and Ficinus, with his Latin epigrams. He was not much older when he undertook to translate Homer into Latin verse, and at twenty-nine we find him filling the chair of rhetoric at Florence, a distinction of which he was abundantly vain. Vanity was, in fact, his prevailing fault, and it raised him a swarm of enemies who could not forgive his airs of superiority, and those biting sarcasms which he knew how to clothe in the most elegant Latin. But even his enemies admitted that, as a professor of eloquence, he stood without a rival. Equally at home in Greek, Latin, or Hebrew eloquence, in the Platonic or the Peripatetic philosophy, in rhetoric or in jurisprudence, he amazed his hearers by the multiplicity of his acquirements, no less than by the facility of his style. No wonder that a lecturer of this stamp should succeed in drawing around him all the great intellects of that wonderful age. On the benches beneath that chair you might see the young prince Picus of Mirandola, and the grey-headed men who had been Politian’s own masters; a crowd of foreigners, too, such as the Englishmen Grocyn and Linacre, who were destined to carry back the seeds of polite letters to their own barbaric land, and other pilgrims from France, Germany, and Portugal, besides native scholars from all the cities of Italy. Lorenzo, who in 1469 had succeeded to his father’s wealth and dignities, would also join the learned throng, and hang on the honied words of the young professor. As every one knows, the Muses are not always so happy as to carry the Graces in their train, and Politian’s portrait has been drawn by Jovius in no very flattering terms. On first beholding him, he says, it was impossible to avoid an involuntary movement of surprise and disgust; his huge, unsightly nose, squinting eye, and awkward stoop, inspired no favourable impression; but no sooner had he begun to speak, than your senses were fairly taken captive, and closing your eyes, you willingly gave yourself up to the power of that graceful eloquence and the exquisite music of that voice, which very soon made you indifferent to the defect of other natural advantages in the speaker. “Yes,” you might have said to yourself as you listened, “this is indeed rhetoric; hitherto in that chair I have listened to grammarians and critics, but the Muses have at last taken pity on our grammar-beladen ears, and sent us one who can feel the sentiment of Virgil and Homer, as well as explain their syntax.”

It was, in fact, the possession of that inexplicable gift, the poetic sensibility, which raised Politian to an eminence differing so very widely from that of the Poggios and Vallas who had preceded him, and which made him more charming as a lecturer, and perhaps more amiable as a man. Instead of wrangling over verbs and cases, he loved to picture to his own and his hearers’ imagination, the rural scenes which Virgil painted; and seizing some happy phrase of the Latin poet, to expand, to colour, to revivify it till you wandered under the shade of the beech trees, and heard the very hum of the bees among the odorous limes. At such moments, laying down his book, with the skill of an Improvisatore, he would take you to the woods and fields, and make you listen to “the soft and soul-like sounds” of the wind, as it sighed among the pines, to the rustling of the oak leaves in Vallombrosa, to the merry chattering of the tiny brook over its bed of pebbles, and the lowing of the herds in the rich Tuscan pastures. All this, to the ears of the Florentines, so long condemned to a sort of intellectual aridity, was like fresh showers on a thirsty soil. To none was it more delightful than to Lorenzo, himself a poet of no mean ability, and keenly alive to the charm of rural sights and rural sounds; and after listening to such a lecture, he would wait in the hall, and taking the professor by the arm, would lead him out to that fair villa at Fiesole, which looked over the dome and towers of Florence, and over a varied landscape of mountains, woods, and gardens, all glittering in the sunset glories of a Tuscan sky. There were gathered day after day the choicest intellects and the most erudite minds, men of all nations and of all gifts: critics, artists, poets, antiquarians; Lorenzo had a welcome for each, and was as ready to reward the happy presentee of an ancient medal or a classic vase, as he was to add to his library a Greek manuscript brought from the farther end of Europe by Lascaris,[310] or a new treatise from the pen of Landino. Every day some fresh treasure was displayed to the admiration of his illustrious friends, some chef d’œuvre of ancient sculpture, or a heap of Eastern manuscripts, sold to him by a Jewish merchant for their weight in gold. “I love these books so dearly,” he once said, “that I would give my whole princely wardrobe to purchase them.” The arts were not forgotten. Perugino was among the honoured guests of Fiesole; and among the pupils of Politian was the young sculptor Michael Angelo Buonarotti, whom Lorenzo lodged in his palace, and treated as his own son. The Platonic academicians, too, found a warm supporter in the grandson of their founder, and Ficinus gratified to the full his thirst for sunshine, and his dreamy poetic tastes in that little chamber, where morning after morning he loved to throw open the windows, and listen to the song of the birds as they greeted the dawn, and drink in the fragrance of the hawthorn and the honeysuckle, and the thousand exotic plants which blossomed on the parterres and terraces. There, to use the exquisite similitude of the English philosopher, “the breath of the flowers in the open air came and went like the warbling of music;”[311] there the fountains threw up their graceful jets, and made a pleasant murmur to the ear, and the sensitive and highly-wrought organisation of the Platonic scholar was soothed and invigorated by contact with all that was beautiful to the eye and ear in nature or in art.

All this was delightful enough, nor is it to be wondered at that the grace and fascination of such scenes blinded the eyes of those who took part in them, and the judgment of those who have been their historians. But, in truth, there was another side to the picture. The revival of classic taste at Florence was a revival of practical Paganism. It was not a mere return to those principles which had been admitted in the Christian schools before the rise of Scholasticism, when the Latin poets were freely studied even in ecclesiastical seminaries, and the Greek learning of the monks of St. Gall earned for some among them the title of the Frati Ellenici. It was a great deal more than this. It not only restored the study of the classic writers, but also their habits of thought, and their gross sensuality. It revived the Pagan, and excluded the Christian ideas; Christ was no longer recognised as “the One Teacher of man;” on the contrary, even from the pulpit you heard quotations from Virgil and Juvenal quite as often as from the Gospels. A style of speaking had become fashionable, according to which a certain sort of barbarism was associated with the idea of Christianity, as though it were something Gothic and transmontane. The Saints and Fathers of the Church gradually disappeared from the schools; the touching representations of Christian mysteries were withdrawn from the public eye; and society, instead of being permeated, as in former centuries, with an atmosphere of the faith, was now redolent of heathenism. Christianity was looked on as unworthy of furnishing subjects to the pen or pencil of the scholar. In those trellised gardens where the wits of Florence assembled to listen to the graceful eloquence of Politian, were grouped fragments of ancient art or the copies of modern sculptors, the eager students of the new school of naturalism. Here it was an undraped Venus, there a Satyr or a Bacchanal. Sometimes Lorenzo appeared among the brilliant throng, and condescended to assign to the artists whom he entertained a new subject for their genius. To Pollajuolo he gave the twelve labours of Hercules, to Ghirlandajo the misfortunes of Vulcan, to Luca Signorelli all the gods and goddesses of Olympus, whose stories were to be represented with little of that reserve demanded by Christian modesty. Yet artists might have been found at that time whose genius was impressed with a more religious character, but they received no encouragement at Florence, where the school most in favour was that which substituted sensual for mystic beauty; and this debased heathenised taste equally pervaded the Florentine literature and schools.

The books admitted as class-books into the new academies were precisely those authors which have been in all ages proscribed as the most dangerous, but which were now placed in the hands of the young without restriction of any sort. And, indeed, what kind of moral safeguards were likely to be supplied by professors such as Filelfo, Poggio, and Valla, whose licentious language was unhappily rather the rule than the exception among the teachers of the day? The study of the Scriptures, which in earlier times had filled so large a place in the scholastic course, was now all but entirely laid aside; and we are assured that some would even ask, with astonishing simplicity, what use could be derived from the knowledge of events that had happened so many ages ago? As to that liturgical element which had hitherto mingled so largely in the scheme of Christian education, it had little chance of being preserved in an age when not lay professors alone, but even ecclesiastics, were so besotted with their devotion to Pagan models, as to show themselves ashamed of the language of the Church formularies. Whilst some escaped from the misery of reciting their Latin breviaries by obtaining permission to use a Greek or Hebrew version, others gave up reading the Epistles of St. Paul through fear of accustoming their ears to so unclassical a style; and numerous proposals were set on foot for what was called a reform of the Liturgy, which should have for its object the correction of its style and its adaptation to classical forms. But even these were not the worst excesses. Tiraboschi assures us that scepticism and open unbelief were becoming frightfully common among men of letters, and specially in the Italian universities which were declared in the following century to be hot-beds of infidelity. Yet so innate in the human soul is the craving for some kind of mysticism, that at the very time that faith in the Christian mysteries was being rejected, many were entangling themselves in the absurdities of the Jewish Cabala; and not a few addicted themselves to magical studies, practising rites and incantations of most shocking impiety. Even where these grosser disorders did not exist, the combined influence of heathenism and sensuality produced a certain irreligious and intensely worldly tone, more difficult, perhaps, to combat than open vice or infidelity; and it was of this that Savonarola complained when from the pulpit of St. Mark’s he first addressed the Florentines with his fervid Biblical eloquence, but found his glowing words fall, as he expressed it, upon hearts as hard and as cold as marble.

In other respects, also, the age of the Medici resembled but too closely that of Augustus. It was an age when a people were being cajoled to surrender their freedom into the hands of an absolute ruler, who used as his instrument for undermining republican institutions weapons far more deadly than the sword. Lorenzo had read Tacitus to some purpose, and thoroughly understood his maxim, that the easiest way to enslave a nation is first to corrupt it. He scrupled not to secure his political ascendancy in Florence by ministering to the baser passions of the populace. He amused them with shows and dances, carnival masquerades, and midnight processions, in which the flood-gates of license were freely opened, and heathen fables were represented in all their most unseemly crudeness; and in return they let him steal away their independence, and appropriate to himself the authority of the sovereign of Florence under the title of her First Citizen. Magnificent orgies were held by torchlight, wherein the triumph of Bacchus and Ariadne, or some other such subject, was enacted by bands of superbly-dressed masquers, singing those celebrated carnival songs composed by Lorenzo, which were, we are told, for the most part, immoral and indecent, expressing, not the graceful Platonism of a classical academy, but a mythological burlesque, flavoured for the grosser tastes of the populace.

It was against this flood of iniquity in the schools, the palace, and the public streets, that the bold eloquence of Savonarola was at this time directed, creating a moral reaction, which proved, however fallacious in its brilliant promise of reform. Taking the Scriptures as his weapon of warfare, he dealt rude and terrible blows at those who were sapping the very foundations of Christianity with their elegant Paganism. He complained that priests and doctors now thought of nothing but rhetoric. They studied Horace and Cicero to prepare themselves for the cure of souls. They gave up the study of the Scriptures in order to preach Plato from the pulpit. The very art and music which they encouraged were instruments of demoralisation rather than of popular instruction. Most terrible was the eloquence with which he attacked the authors of such abuses. “How have you renounced the Devil and his pomps?” he exclaimed in one of his sermons—“you, who every day do his works, and attend not to the law of Christ, but the literature of the Gentiles; declaring the Scriptures to contain only food fit for women, and demanding in their place the eloquence of Tully and the sounding words of the poets to be preached to you!” On no subject were his strictures more unsparing than on the education of the young. He built his hopes of reform not on his grown-up hearers and converts; but on the children, for whose benefit he sought to introduce a system of studies, the principles of which in the main coincided with those of the ancient Christian schools. He did not propose the exclusion of the heathen poets and philosophers, but demanded that no lesson in Pagan literature should be given without a simultaneous one from Christian sources; that the Scriptures should be ever in the hand of the professor; that St. Jerome and St. Augustine should be studied together with Homer and Cicero; that no book of immoral tendency should be tolerated in the schools; and that teachers should not fail to point out to their pupils the folly and impiety of the heathen fables.

Savonarola had the satisfaction of effecting not a few conversions among the men of letters who gathered round his pulpit. Ficinus became his warm apologist, and after listening to his sermons declared his intention of devoting the rest of his life to religion. Nicholas of Schomberg and Zenobius Acciajoli abandoned the world, and assumed the Dominican habit. Picus Mirandola sold all his estates and distributed the price to the poor, and even Politian on his death-bed received the habit of religion from the hand of one of his friars. But whatever were the success gained by the preacher among the Florentine courtiers, his eloquence was powerless over the mind of their master. Lorenzo and Savonarola each tried to gain the other, and each was doomed to suffer defeat. Lorenzo vainly tried to corrupt or silence an orator who was equally indifferent to threats or bribes; and when the prince lay on his death-bed, Savonarola, as vainly, strove to wring from him a promise to restore her liberties to Florence. After his death, indeed, which took place in 1492, a brilliant triumph seemed to crown the hopes of the popular friar, and under his leadership, Florence, having expelled the Medici, seemed about to exchange her debased republicanism for a theocracy, and her free life of pleasure for an almost puritanic severity of manners. But the tide of social corruption which had for a moment been thus forcibly dammed up, soon burst the barrier that opposed it, and swept away all traces of the seeming reform, the reformer himself being the first victim of its fury. Those very streets of Florence which had witnessed the Medicean carnival shows, and where a little later the Florentines, under the direction of their republican chief, had made solemn acts of reparation for past license, now saw the reformer himself borne to ignominious execution amid the howls and blasphemies of an infuriated populace.