It flourished, above all things, on the insecurity inseparable from the turbulent Italian life of the Renaissance, even as it had flourished on the appalling vicissitude of the drama of imperial Rome; and it is conceivable that the inclination to true science which is seen in such men as Galileo, after the period of Italian independence, was nourished by the greater stability attained for a time under absolutist rule. And though Protestantism, on the other hand, adhered in the main unreasoningly to the theory of a moral control, that dogma at least served to countervail the dominion of astrology, which was only a dogmatism with a difference, and as such inevitably hindered true science.[200] On the whole, Protestantism tended to make more effectual that veto on pagan occultism which had been ineffectually passed from time to time by the Catholic Church; albeit the motive was stress of Christian superstition, and the veto was aimed almost as readily at inductive and true science as at the deductive and false. We shall find the craze of witchcraft, in turn, dominating Protestant countries at a time when freethinkers and liberal Catholics elsewhere were setting it at naught.
There can be little doubt that, broadly speaking, the new interest in Scripture study and ecclesiastical history told against the free play of thought on scientific and scholarly problems; we shall find Bacon realizing the fact a hundred years after Luther’s start; and the influence has operated down to our own day. In this resistance Catholics played their part. The famous Cornelius Agrippa[201] (1486–1535) never ceased to profess himself a Catholic, and had small sympathy with the Reformers, though always at odds with the monks; and his long popular treatise De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum et artium, atque excellentia verbi Dei declamatio (1531) is a mere polemic for scripturalism against alike false science and true, monkish superstition and reason. Vilified as a magician by the monks, and as an atheist and a scoffer by angry humanists,[202] he did but set error against error, being himself a believer in witchcraft, a hater of anatomy, and as confident in his contempt of astronomy as of astrology. And his was a common frame of mind for centuries.
Still, the new order contained certain elements of help for a new life, as against its own inclement principles of authority and dogma; and the political heterogeneity of Europe, seconded by economic pressures and by new geographic discovery, sufficed further to prevent any far-reaching organization of tyranny. Under these conditions, new knowledge could incubate new criticism. But it would be an error-breeding oversight to forget that in the many-coloured world before the Reformation there was not only a certain artistic and imaginative sunlight which the Reformation long darkened, but even, athwart the mortal rigours of papal rule, a certain fitful play of intellectual insight to which the peoples of the Reformation became for a time estranged.
[1] J. A. Symonds writes that in the age of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio “what we call the Renaissance had not yet arrived” (Renaissance in Italy: Age of the Despots, ed. 1897, p. 9). [↑]
[2] Cp. Renan, Averroès, 3e édit. pp. 280–82, 295; Lewes, Hist. of Philos., 4th ed. ii, 67; Reuter, Gesch. der relig. Aufklärung im Mittelalter, i, 139–41. It is noteworthy that the troubadour, Austore d’Orlac, in cursing the crusades and the clergy who promoted them, suggests that the Christians should turn Moslems, seeing that God is on the side of the unbelievers (Gieseler, Per. III. Div. III, § 58, note 1). [↑]
[3] Cp. Burckhardt, Civ. of the Renais. in Italy, Eng. tr. ed. 1892, pp. 490, 492. [↑]
[5] Hardwick, p. 354, note. [↑]
[6] Cp. Hardwick, p. 361; “Janus,” The Pope and the Council, p. 308. [↑]