A History of the Reformation (Vol. 1 of 2)

by Thomas M. Lindsay

§ 2. The Revival of Literature and Art.

But the Renaissance has generally a more limited meaning, and one defined by the most potent of the new forces which worked for the general intellectual regeneration. It means the revival of learning and of art consequent on the discovery and study of the literary and artistic masterpieces of antiquity. It is perhaps in this more limited sense that the movement more directly prepared the way for the Reformation and what followed, and deserves more detailed examination. It was the discovery of a lost means of culture and the consequent awakening and diffusion of a literary, artistic, and critical spirit.

A knowledge of ancient Latin literature had not entirely perished during the earlier Middle Ages. The Benedictine monasteries had preserved classical manuscripts—especially the monastery of Monte Cassino for the southern, and that of Fulda for the northern parts of Europe. These monasteries and their sister establishments were schools of learning as well as libraries, and we read of more than one where the study of some of the classical authors was part of the regular training. Virgil, Horace, Terence and Martial, Livy, Suetonius and Sallust, were known and studied. Greek literature had not survived to anything like the same extent, but it had never entirely disappeared from Southern Europe, and especially from Southern Italy. Ever since the days of the Roman Republic in that part of the Italian peninsula once called Magna Græcia, Greek had been the language of many of the common people, as it is to this day, in districts of Calabria and of Sicily; and the teachers and students of the mediæval University of Salerno had never lost their taste for its study.[18] But with all this, the fourteenth century, and notably the age of Petrarch, saw the beginnings [pg 047] of new zeal for the literature of the past, and was really the beginning of a new era.

Italy was the first land to become free from the conditions of mediæval life, and ready to enter on the new life which was awaiting Europe. There was an Italian language, the feeling of distinct nationality, a considerable advance in civilisation, an accumulation of wealth, and, during the age of the despots, a comparative freedom from constant changes in political conditions.

Dante's great poem, interweaving as it does the imagery and mysticism of Giacchino di Fiore, the deepest spiritual and moral teaching of the mediæval Church, and the insight and judgment on men and things of a great poet, was the first sign that Italy had wakened from the sleep of the Middle Ages. Petrarch came next, the passionate student of the lives, the thoughts, and emotions of the great masters of classical Latin literature. They were real men for him, his own Italian ancestors, and they as he had felt the need of Hellenic culture to solace their souls, and serve for the universal education of the human race. Boccaccio, the third leader in the awakening, preached the joy of living, the universal capacity for pleasure, and the sensuous beauty of the world. He too, like Petrarch, felt the need of Hellenic culture. For both there was an awakening to the beauty of literary form, and the conviction that a study of the ancient classics would enable them to achieve it. Both valued the vision of a new conception of life derived from the perusal of the classics, freer, more enlarged and joyous, more rational than the Middle Ages had witnessed. Petrarch and Boccaccio yearned after the life thus disclosed, which gave unfettered scope to the play of the emotions, to the sense of beauty, and to the manifold activity of the human intelligence.

Learned Greeks were induced to settle in Italy—men who were able to interpret the ancient Greek poets and prose writers—Manuel Chrysoloras (at Florence, 1397-1400), George of Trebizond, Theodore Gaza (whose Greek Grammar Erasmus taught from while in England), Gemistos [pg 048] Plethon, a distinguished Platonist, under whom the Christian Platonism received its impulse, and John Argyropoulos, who was the teacher of Reuchlin. The men of the early Renaissance were their pupils.

§ 3. Its earlier relation to Christianity.

There was nothing hostile to Christianity or to the mediæval Church in the earlier stages of this intellectual revival, and very little of the neo-paganism which it developed afterwards. Many of the instincts of mediæval piety remained, only the objects were changed. Petrarch revered the MS. of Homer, which he could not read, as an ancestor of his might have venerated the scapulary of a saint.[19] The men of the early Renaissance made collections of MSS. and inscriptions, of cameos and of coins, and worshipped them as if they had been relics. The Medicean Library was formed about 1450, the Vatican Library in 1453, and the age of passionate collection began.

The age of scholarship succeeded, and Italian students began to interpret the ancient classical authors with a mysticism all their own. They sought a means of reconciling Christian thought with ancient pagan philosophy, and, like Clement of Alexandria and Origen, discovered it in Platonism. Platonic academies were founded, and Cardinal Bessarion, Marsiglio Ficino, and Pico della Mirandola became the Christian Platonists of Italy. Of course, in their enthusiasm they went too far. They appropriated the whole intellectual life of a pagan age, and adopted its ethical as well as its intellectual perceptions, its basis of sensuous pleasures, and its joy in sensuous living. Still their main thought was to show that Hellenism as well as Judaism was a pathway to Christianity, and that the Sibyl as well as David was a witness for Christ.