The grand-daughter of that Carlo Malatesta (who took so much to heart the Gospel precepts of sacrificing whatever gives scandal—be it a man’s own right eye, or right hand—that he had, during his guardianship of a Gonzaga minor, thrown into the lake, at Mantua, a statue of Virgil, to which he found the people paying idolatrous reverence), her girlhood had been spent in Rimini, as great in repentance as in crime. Rimini hath other memories besides that of Francesca; and Madonna Paola, in the very year[9] when the fate of her kinswoman, Parisina, at the hands of her husband, Marquis Nicholas of Ferrara, recalled, but too exactly, the story heard by Dante in the Second Circle of the Inferno, may well have turned to one of them for comfort. During the years of her girlhood, Rimini was the scene of the labours of the great Dominican reformer, the Blessed Giovanni Dominici. This remarkable man was a great friend of her grandfather, and we may well assume that his book, the “Regola del Governo di Cura famigliare,” though dedicated to a Florentine lady, Madonna Bartolommea, wife of Antonio Alberti (and kinswoman of the celebrated Leo Battista Alberti) was not unknown to those who had charge of Paola’s education, and, very probably, represented one of the very strongest influences of her girlhood. If this be so, it is impossible to see nothing more than a mere chance in the selection of a teacher who had already made a name for himself by a system of education exactly corresponding to that outlined in Dominici’s treatise. In studying the Renaissance, we are under a great disadvantage from the fact that its best known interpreters are generally quite incapable of appreciating the force and vivacity of religion during it. Symonds, and Burckhardt, and Settenbrini, setting out to prove Michelet’s theory that “the Renaissance was a discovery of the World and Man,” reject and misinterpret anything that contradicts it. The Middle Ages must be made as dark, and stagnant, and evil-smelling as possible—the “Dead Sea” indeed of Symonds; and the guiding principle of the Middle Ages, the Catholic Religion, must be a Spirit of Darkness—otherwise, what becomes of the theory? Poor Humanity, according to Symonds, had a cowl put on it by the Obscurantist Church, and was bidden to look neither “on the azure of the waters, nor the luxuriance of the vines, nor the radiance of the mountains with their robe of sun and snow.” And so, with downcast eyes, it passed on its way, knowing nothing but that “beauty is a snare, pleasure a sin, the world a fleeting show, man fallen and lost, death the only certainty, judgment inevitable, hell everlasting, heaven hard to win, ignorance acceptable to God.” “These,” we were told, were the “fixed ideas of the mediæval Church.”
I have no intention of refuting this palpably absurd rendering of the Catholic outlook, nor is there much necessity, for, fortunately, true history is coming into her own. In Germany she has made her first conquests; and here, thinking of men like Janssen, and Pastor, and Emil Michael, and praying to see go forth one day from the Lecture Halls of our Irish Universities, reapers to follow them into the fields that stand ready for the sickle; I cannot but rejoice at the bright prospects of a great Irish publishing house, which shall do for Irish savants, what Herder did for those of Germany.
As long as historians like Symonds interpreted the Renaissance for us, it was inevitable that we should be shown only a small part of it—just as much as would fit comfortably into the Michelet formula. Moreover, Symonds and his fellows really did not know Catholicism when they saw it. Between involuntary ignorance, and deliberate “suppressiones veri,” they have managed to give us a very untruthful picture of the Renaissance.
It is with something like a gasp of wonder we turn to the complete picture presented by Dr. Pastor. Here, side by side with belated Pagans, like the “Panormita,” and Lorenzo Valla, we see true Christian Savants like Gianozzo Manetti, Lionardo Bruni, Ambrogio Traversari, and our own Vittorino; side by side with monsters like Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta we have Christian rulers like the good Duke Frederick of Urbino; side by side with social butterflies like poor Beatrice of Este, we have devoted mothers of families like Madonna Paola; side by side with the celebrated sinners, we have the canonized saints, a long, long list of them. I believe, indeed, that, at no period of their history, have the two great Orders of St. Francis and St. Dominic shown themselves so fruitful in Saints, as that across which Symonds would fain have us see written the “I follow the finite” of Cosimo de’ Medici.
As a result of this treatment of the period, many of its most characteristic works have been hidden away from us. So it has come to pass that, while most students of Italian Literature know a great deal about a book like “Il Trattato del Governo della Famiglia,” if only because the question of its authorship has been so hotly debated, even those who hold for the paternity of Leo Battista Alberti, as against Pandolfini, may very well be unaware of the existence of the “Regola del Governo di Cura Famigliare,” dedicated to Leo Battista’s kinswoman, Bartolommea.
If anything were wanting to prove how much alike is Catholicism in all ages and nations, one would only have to put this little book, written five hundred years ago, for a Florentine lady, into the hands of an Irish Catholic mother of to-day, and see how much of it she can use for herself. Practically all of it, we should find.
“You have offered yourself,” the author says to Bartolommea, “body and soul, with all your possessions and your children, as far as they belong to you, to God, Our Lord, and now you want to know how to make the best use of all these things for His glory.” Thus, with the precision of the schoolman, he states and divides his subject. The first book, then, tells how to use the powers of the soul for God; the second, the faculties and senses of the body; the third, temporal goods. The fourth book tells how children are to be trained, and is, indeed, a most thorough treatise on Education.
Children are to be brought up (1) for God, (2) for father and mother, (3) for themselves, (4) for their country, (5) for the trials of life. Again, you see the schoolman, and admire the method. Can anything be more admirable than this summing up of the whole end and aim of Catholic Education, which takes account of the child in his future relations as Christian, member of a family, individual with an individual’s responsibilities for the investment of his talents (the faculties of soul and body), citizen, and man?
Then, with an astonishing feeling for realities, he prescribes the practical method by which this end shall be attained.