The expulsion of the Medici from Florence in no way checked the progress of the classical Renaissance, which only attained its full growth in the following generation. To the age of Lorenzo the Magnificent succeeded that of his son Pope Leo X., under whose princely rule Rome drew to herself the literary throngs who had before illuminated the Tuscan court, and rejoiced in the questionable glories of a second Augustan age. But of Rome and her Pontiffs, her garish splendour and her true reform, we shall speak in another chapter. Before doing so we must first look across the Alps, and see what has been going on in the world of letters in the colder climate of the North.
CHAPTER XXI.
DEVENTER, LOUVAIN, AND ALCALA.
A.D. 1360 TO 1517.
It is not to be supposed that the development which had been taken by the universities, and which we have been engaged in tracing in the foregoing chapters, the perils to which their younger members were exposed, and the yet graver results that might be expected to ensue to faith and morals if their influence continued without some salutary check, could fail, even in their own day, of attracting the attention of thoughtful men; and much curious illustration might be drawn from the literature of the fourteenth century, tending to show how questionable a place the great academies of learning at that time held in popular estimation. The most racy legends of mediæval diablerie generally introduce us to some student of Paris or Salamanca, who has made a compact with the enemy of souls; while the graver histories of the saints are crowded with examples of those who fled into the cloister to escape the contagion of the schools.
The danger to which the scholastic convertites seem to have been most sensitively alive was not one, perhaps, which, to modern notions, would seem the most appalling. It was not the licentious manners, nor even precisely the heterodox opinions of the schools, which chiefly terrified them, but the subtle perils of intellectual vanity. It has been before remarked that, among the old monastic scholars, the existence of this danger was hardly recognised. The obligations of their state for the most part protected them from its attacks. “What they learnt without guile they communicated without envy,”[312] and they believed and practically set forth the doctrine which, as one of modern times has beautifully expressed it, acknowledges “humility, the basis of morals, to be also the foundation of reason.” So entirely did the rules of holy living purge the pursuit of science from the leaven of pride, that it is quite common to find ancient writers speaking of learning as though it were almost a virtue. Things had sadly changed in this respect since the close of the tenth century, and the warnings which St. Bernard addressed to the scholars of his day had to be repeated by the ascetics of each successive age with ever-increasing earnestness. He sorrowfully lamented that those who pursued learning were daily more and more losing sight of its right order, its right motive, and its right end. The order of true knowledge, he said, is to set in the first rank the things that concern salvation; its motive should be charity, and its end, neither curiosity nor vain-glory, but our own or our neighbour’s edification. And he failed not to remind the would-be philosophers whom he addressed, and whose chief object seemed to be to make themselves talked about, that the “biting tooth” of the Latin satirist had long before drawn their portraits, and ridiculed those who only care to know in order that somebody else may know that they know.[313] The evils he complained of had certainly not abated with time; nevertheless, the old Christian morality, which was so based on intellectual lowliness as to be hardly capable of realising a fear of the opposite vice until it arose before the eye in all its deformity, was too deeply rooted in Christendom to be eradicated by one or two generations of professors; and its influence may be traced in the horror which good men felt and expressed for what they regarded as a more radical poison than the grosser temptations of an undisciplined life. And we who have witnessed the later issues of that great Revolt of Reason which took its beginnings in the pride of intellect, and which will find its end in the reign of Antichrist, are bound to bear witness that they judged aright, and to applaud a sagacity which originated less perhaps in any very quick-sighted intelligence than in the undulled instincts of the Christian sense.
When, therefore, we represent to ourselves the learned world of the Middle Ages crowding to the universities that were starting up in almost every provincial capital of France, Germany, Italy, and Spain, we must not forget that a quiet undercurrent was always flowing in an opposite direction, though it had no power to overcome the strong full tide of fashion. Thus, the life of the Blessed Peter Jeremias, of the Order of Preachers, presents us with the picture of the student of Bologna about to read for his doctor’s degree, when, one night as he sits at his books, the window of his room is dashed in, and the voice of one of his fellow-students, recently departed, warns him in terrible accents to renounce those academic honours, in the greedy pursuit of which he had lost his immortal soul. Peter, pierced to the soul by this voice from beyond the grave, abandons his intention of reading for honours, and presents himself the next morning at the gates of the Dominican Convent to implore admission among the friars. And it was to another conversion of this sort, somewhat less pictorial in its colouring, that we owe the foundation of a very remarkable religious institute, too closely associated with the history of education to be left unnoticed here.
Somewhere about the year 1360 there appeared at Paris a young Flemish student named Gerard, a native of the town of Deventer, whose success in every branch of study acquired him no mean fame in academic circles, and inflated him with a corresponding degree of vanity. He took his master’s degree in his eighteenth year, received several rich benefices, began a very pompous and expensive way of life, and at last removed to Cologne, less to study than to display and enjoy himself. There, however, he found his fate awaiting him. It was the precise period when a great spiritual reaction was going on in Rhenish Germany: not twenty years before Cologne had witnessed the conversion of the celebrated John Tauler, whose pride of learning had yielded to the simple word of a nameless unlettered layman, and who spent the rest of his life in preaching those doctrines of self-abnegation on which he built the edifice of the spiritual life. Ruysbroek, the greatest contemplative of his time, was still living in the Green Valley of the forest of Soignies, and training many a fervid soul in the mystic science which aimed at uniting man to God by utterly separating him from creatures. It was probably one of these disciples of Ruysbroek, a religious solitary, whose name, like that of Tauler’s “layman,” has not been preserved, who determined to undertake the conversion of the gay young canon, in whom, despite his vanity and his love of the world, he detected the promise of more excellent things.