“Le 16e siècle n’a eu aucune mauvaise pensée que le 13e n’ait eue avant lui” (Renan, Averroès, p. 231). Renan, however, seems astray in stating that “Le Poème de la Descente de Saint Paul aux enfers parle avec terreur d’une société secrète qui avait juré la destruction de Christianisme” (id. p. 284). The poem simply describes the various tortures of sinners in hell, and mentions in their turn those who “en terre, à sainte Iglise firent guerre,” and in death “Verbe Deu refusouent”; also those “Ki ne croient que Deu fust nez (né), ne que Sainte Marie l’eust portez, ne que por le peuple vousist (voulait) mourir, ne que peine deignast soffrir.” See the text as given by Ozanam, Dante, ed. 6ième, Ptie. iv—the version cited by Renan.
So, with regard to the belief in magic, there was no general advance in the later Renaissance on the skepticism of Pietro of Abano, a famous Paduan physician and Averroïst, who died, at the age of 80, in 1305. He appears to have denied alike magic and miracles, though he held fast by astrology, and ascribed the rise and progress of all religions to the influence of the stars. Himself accused of magic, he escaped violent death by dying naturally before his trial was ended; and the Inquisition burned either his body or his image.[280] After him, superstition seems to have gone step for step with skepticism.
Dante’s own poetic genius, indeed, did much to arrest intellectual evolution in Italy. Before his time, as we have seen, the trouvères of northern France and the Goliards of the south had handled hell in a spirit of burlesque; and his own teacher, Brunetto Latini, had framed a poetic allegory, Il Tesoretto, in which Nature figures as the universal power, behind which the God-idea disappeared.[281] But Dante’s tremendous vision ultimately effaced all others of the kind; and his intellectual predominance in virtue of mere imaginative art is at once the great characteristic and the great anomaly of the early Renaissance. Happily the inseparable malignity of his pietism was in large part superseded by a sunnier spirit;[282] but his personality and his poetry helped to hold the balance of authority on the side of faith.[283] Within a few years of his death there was burned at Florence (1327) one of the most daring heretics of the later Middle Ages, Cecco Stabili d’Ascoli, a professor of philosophy and astrology at Bologna, who is recorded to have had some intimacy with Dante, and to have been one of his detractors.[284] Cecco has been described as “representing natural science, against the Christian science of Dante”;[285] and though his science was primitive, the summing-up is not unwarranted. Combining strong anti-Christian feeling with the universal belief in astrology, he had declared that Jesus lived as a sluggard (come un poltrone) with his disciples, and died on the cross, under the compulsion of his star.[286] In view of the blasphemer’s fate, such audacity was not often repeated.
As against Dante, the great literary influence for tolerance and liberalism if not rationalism of thought was Boccaccio (1313–1375), whose Decameron[287] anticipates every lighter aspect of the Renaissance—its levity, its licence, its humour, its anti-clericalism, its incipient tolerance, its irreverence, its partial freethinking, as well as its exuberance in the joy of living. On the side of anti-clericalism, the key-note is struck so strongly and so defiantly in some of the opening tales that the toleration of the book by the papal authorities can be accounted for only by their appreciation of the humour of the stories therein told against them, as that[288] of the Jew who, after seeing the utter corruption of the clergy at Rome, turned Christian on the score that only by divine support could such a system survive. No Protestant ever passed a more scathing aspersion on the whole body of the curia than is thus set in the forefront of the Decameron. Still more deeply significant of innovating thought, however, is the famous story of The Three Rings,[289] embodied later by Lessing in his Nathan the Wise as an apologue of tolerance. Such a story, introduced with whatever parade of orthodox faith, could not but make for rational skepticism, summarizing as it does the whole effect of the inevitable comparison of the rival creeds made by the men of Italy and those of the east in their intercourse. The story itself, centring on Saladin, is of eastern origin,[290] and so tells of even more freethinking than meets the eye in the history of Islam.[291] It is noteworthy that the Rabbi Simeon Duran (1360–1444), who follows on this period, appears to be the first Jewish teacher to plead for mutual toleration among the conflicting schools of his race.[292]
Current in Italy before Boccaccio, the tale had been improved from one Italian hand to another;[293] and the main credit for its full development is Boccaccio’s.[294] Though the Church never officially attempted to suppress the book—leaving it to Savonarola to destroy as far as possible the first edition—the more serious clergy naturally resented its hostility, first denouncing it, then seeking to expurgate all the anti-clerical passages;[295] and the personal pressure brought to bear upon Boccaccio had the effect of dispiriting and puritanizing him; so that the Decameron finally wrought its effect in its author’s despite.[296] So far as we can divine the deeper influence of such a work on medieval thought, it may reasonably be supposed to have tended, like that of Averroïsm, towards Unitarianism or deism, inasmuch as a simple belief in deity is all that is normally implied in its language on religious matters. On that view it bore its full intellectual fruit only in the two succeeding centuries, when deism and Unitarianism alike grew up in Italy, apparently from non-scholastic roots.
It is an interesting problem how far the vast calamity of the Black Death (1348–49) told either for skepticism or for superstition in this age. In Boccaccio’s immortal book we see a few refined Florentines who flee the pest giving themselves up to literary amusement; but there is also mention of many who had taken to wild debauchery, and there are many evidences as to wild outbreaks of desperate licence all over Europe.[297] On the other hand, many were driven by fear to religious practices;[298] and in the immense destruction of life the Church acquired much new wealth. At the same time the multitudes of priests who died[299] had as a rule to be replaced by ill-trained persons, where the problem was not solved by creating pluralities, the result being a general falling-off in the culture and the authority of the clergy.[300] But there seems to have been little or no growth of such questioning as came later from the previously optimistic Voltaire after the earthquake of Lisbon; and the total effect of the immense reduction of population all over Europe seems to have been a lowering of the whole of the activities of life. Certainly the students of Paris in 1376 were surprisingly freethinking on scriptural points;[301] but there is nothing to show that the great pestilence had set up any new movement of ethical thought. In some ways it grievously deepened bigotry, as in regard to the Jews, who were in many regions madly impeached as having caused the plague by poisoning the wells, and were then massacred in large numbers.
Side by side with Boccaccio, his friend Petrarch (1304–1374), who with him completes the great literary trio of the late Middle Ages, belongs to freethought in that he too, with less aggressiveness but also without recoil, stood for independent culture and a rational habit of mind as against the dogmatics and tyrannies of the Church.[302] He was in the main a practical humanist, not in accord with the verbalizing scholastic philosophy of his time, and disposed to find his intellectual guide in the skeptical yet conservative Cicero. The scholastics had become as fanatical for Aristotle or Averroës as the churchmen were for their dogmas;[303] and Petrarch made for mental freedom by resisting all dogmatisms alike.[304] The general liberality of his attitude has earned him the titles of “the first modern man”[305] and “the founder of modern criticism”[306]—both somewhat high-pitched.[307] He represented in reality the sobering and clarifying influence of the revived classic culture on the fanaticisms developed in the Middle Ages; and when he argued for the rule of reason in all things[308] it was not that he was a deeply searching rationalist, but that he was spontaneously averse to all the extremes of thought around him, and was concerned to discredit them. For himself, having little speculative power, he was disposed to fall back on a simple and tolerant Christianity. Thus he is quite unsympathetic in his references to those scholars of his day who privately indicated their unbelief. Knowing nothing of the teaching of Averroës, he speaks of him, on the strength of Christian fictions, as “that mad dog who, moved by an execrable rage, barks against his Lord Christ and the Catholic faith.”[309] Apart from such conventional odium theologicum, his judgment, like his literary art, was clear and restrained; opening no new vistas, but bringing a steady and placid light to bear on its chosen sphere.
Between such humanistic influences and that of more systematic and scholastic thought, Italy in that age was the chief source of practical criticism of Christian dogmas; and the extent to which a unitarian theism was now connected with the acceptance of the philosophy of Averroës brought it about, despite the respectful attitude of Dante, who gave him a tranquil place in hell,[310] that he came to figure as Antichrist for the faithful.[311] Petrarch in his letters speaks of much downright hostility to the Christian system on the part of Averroïsts;[312] and the association of Averroïsm with the great medical school of Padua[313] must have promoted practical skepticism among physicians. Being formally restricted to the schools, however, it tended there to undergo the usual scholastic petrifaction; and the common-sense deism it encouraged outside had to subsist without literary discipline. In this form it probably reached many lands, without openly affecting culture or life; since Averroïsm itself was professed generally in the Carmelite order, who claimed for it orthodoxy.[314]
Alongside, however, of intellectual solvents, there were at work others of a more widely effective kind, set up by the long and sinister historic episode of the Great Papal Schism. The Church, already profoundly discredited in the eleventh century by the gross disorders of the papacy, continued frequently throughout the twelfth to exhibit the old spectacle of rival popes; and late in the fourteenth (1378) there broke out the greatest schism of all. Ostensibly beginning in a riotous coercion of the electing cardinals by the Roman populace, it was maintained on the one side by the standing interest of the clergy in Italy, which called for an Italian head of the Church, and on the other hand by the French interest, which had already enforced the residence of the popes at Avignon from 1305 to 1376. It was natural that, just after the papal chair had been replaced in Italy by Gregory IX, the Romans should threaten violence to the cardinals if they chose any but an Italian; and no less natural that the French court should determine to restore a state of things in which it controlled the papacy in all save its corruption. During the seventy years of “the Captivity,” Rome had sunk to the condition of a poor country town; and to the Italian clergy the struggle for a restoration was a matter of economic life and death. For thirty-nine years did the schism last, being ended only by the prolonged action of the great Council of Constance in deposing the rivals of the moment and appointing Martin V (1417); and this was achieved only after there had slipped into the chair of Peter “the most worthless and infamous man to be found.”[315] During the schism every species of scandal had flourished. Indulgences had been sold and distributed at random;[316] simony and venality abounded more than ever;[317] the courts of Rome and Avignon were mere rivals in avarice, indecorum, and reciprocal execration; and in addition to the moral occasion for skepticism there was the intellectual, since no one could show conclusively that the administration of sacraments was valid under either pope.[318]