Tyrants, hypocrites and sophists—that is to say, the triple band of State and Church oppressors, of interested ecclesiastics, and of subtle logicians—have drawn their threefold veil between the human intelligence and the universe, from which alone, as their proper home and milieu, men must derive the knowledge that belongs to them. Campanella, with the sincerity of one to whom the truth is dearer than his own reputation, yields the spolia opima of this latest victory over the strongholds of authority to his master—the master whom he never knew in life, but over whose bier he wept and prayed in secret, hiding the fire of modern freedom and modern science beneath the black cowl of a Dominican friar:[581]
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Telesius, the arrow from thy bow Midmost his band of sophists slays that high Tyrant of souls that think; he cannot fly: While Truth soars free, loosed by the self-same blow. Proud lyres with thine immortal praises glow, Smitten by bards elate with victory: Lo, thine own Cavalcante, stormfully Lightning, still strikes the fortress of the foe! Good Gaieta bedecks our saint serene With robes translucent, light-irradiate, Restoring her to all her natural sheen; The while my tocsin at the temple-gate Of the wide universe proclaims her queen, Pythia of first and last ordained by fate. |
In these verses, the saint and queen proclaimed by Campanella is Nature. During the middle ages truth had seemed to descend as by a sort of inspiration upon man from an extra-mundane God. During the first and second periods of the Renaissance the human intellect repudiated this transcendentalism, but yielded itself, a willing victim, to the authority of books, Plato or Aristotle, and their commentators. Now the mind of man stands face to face with nature, and knows that there, and there alone, is inspiration. The great Baconian secret, the Interrogation of Nature, has been revealed. It is now acknowledged on all sides that not what Telesio or Campanella, or their famous disciple, Bacon, achieved in actual discovery, was noteworthy. But the spirit communicated from Telesio and Campanella to Bacon, is the spirit of modern science. Meanwhile, another native of South Italy, Giordano Bruno, proclaimed the immanence of God in the world, the identification of the universe with God in thought, the impossibility of escaping from God in nature, because nature, realizing God for the human soul, is divine. The central conception of the third age of Italian thought, underlying the apparently divergent systems of Campanella and Bruno—the conception, namely, of a real and indestructible correlation between the human spirit and the actual universe, and the consequent reliance of the human consciousness upon its own testimony in the search for truth—contained the germ of all that has, in very various regions, been subsequently achieved by French, Dutch, English, and German speculators. Telesio and Campanella, long before Bacon, founded empirical science. Campanella and Bruno, long before Descartes, established the principle of idealistic philosophy in the self-conscious thinking faculty of man. The sensualism of Telesio, the spiritualism of Bruno, and Campanella's dualism, foreshadow all possible sects of empiricists, rationalists and eclectics, which have since divided the field of modern speculation. It is easy enough now to look down either from the height of full-blown transcendental metaphysics or from the more modest eminence of solid physical science upon the intellectual abortions generated by this potent conception in its earliest fusion with medieval theology. Yet it is impossible to neglect the negative importance of the work effected by men who declared their independence of ecclesiastical and classical authority in an age when the Church and antiquity contended for the empire of the human reason. Still less possible is it to deny the place of Galileo, Descartes, Bacon, Spinoza, among the offspring begotten of the movement which Pomponazzi, Telesio, Campanella and Bruno inaugurated and developed.
Thus, therefore, by the substitution of human for revealed authority; by the suggestion of new and real topics of inquiry, and finally by the repudiation of all authority except that of nature's ascertained laws; by the rending of all veils between the human reason and the universe, the Italian philosophers of the Renaissance effected for Europe the transition from the middle ages to the modern era.
What is the link of connection between Machiavelli and Pomponazzi, the two leaders of Italian thought at the height of the Renaissance? It may be expressed in one formula—a vivid sense of man and the world as they are; or, in other words, positivism. Machiavelli dispenses with Providence, smiles incredulously at Fortune, explains all social and historical problems by reference to the will and thought of men in action. He studies human nature as he finds it, not as it ought to be according to some ideal standard. Pomponazzi shatters transcendentalism at a blow. He proves that there is no convincing argument for immortality. He demonstrates that the end of man is to be found in conduct. He treats religions without exception as transitory institutions, subject to the universal laws of birth and corruption, useful to society in their day of vigor, but destined to succeed each other with the waxing and the waning of the influences that control our globe and all that it contains. On this point Machiavelli and Pomponazzi are in complete accord. Both of them interpret the spirit of their century.
As Machiavellism existed in Italian politics before Machiavelli theorized it, so materialism leavened society before Pomponazzi gave it the consistency of demonstration. The middle ages with their political and theological idealism were at an end. Machiavelli and Pomponazzi contemporaneously philosophized the realism on which science was destined to be founded. They were the deicides of elder faiths; the hierophants of a new revelation, as yet but dimly apprehended; the Columbus and Vespucci of an intellectual hemisphere which it remained for their posterity to colonize. The conditions of public and private life in the Italian cities—the decline of religious feeling, the corruption of morality, the paganizing tendencies of humanism, the extinction of political activity, the decay of freedom, the survival of the Church and Commune when their work was ended—rendered any such movement as that of the German Reformation wholly impossible. The people lacked the spiritual stuff for it. We have seen that it was chiefly men like Berni and Folengo who gave open utterance to Lutheran opinions; and from sources like those no pure or vivifying waters could be drawn. Italy's work lay in another direction. Those very conditions which unfitted her for a religious revival, enabled her to perform her true mission. It was no slight achievement to have set up the pillars of Hercules for transcendentalism, and at the same time to have discovered the continent of positive science. For the fruits and recognition of her labors she has had to wait. Her history since the date of Machiavelli's death has been obscure until the middle of this century, and in the race of the nations she has been left behind.[582] But the perturbation of the intellectual current caused by the Reformation is now nearly over, and the spirit of modern science still finds itself in harmony with that of the Italian thinkers who gave it earliest expression.