RENAISSANCi!
766
RENAISSANCE
except the true knowledge and worship of Himself,
than these studies."
^\Tien, tlierefore, Nicholas V (1447-55) founded the Vatican Library, his act was inspired by the tradition of the Holy See, deservedly known as the nursing- mother of schools and universities, in which the seven "liberal arts" had always been taught. Paris, the greatest of them, had received formal recognition in 1211 from Innocent III. Between the years 1400 and 1506 we may reckon some twenty-eight charters granted by the popes to as many universities, from St. Andrews to Alcald, and from Caen and Poitiers to Wittenberg and Frankfort-on-the-Oder. But Human- ism was propagated chiefly from Italian centres and by Italian or Greek professors. We must bear in mind a fact which is often lost sight of, that the Scholastic philosophy had never taken deep root in the Peninsula, and that its masters chiefly flourished north of the Alps. Alexander of Hales, Scotus, Middle- ton, Occam, were Britons; Albert the Great was a German; St. Thomas Aquinas, his disciple, taught at Paris. On the other hand, that renaissance of Roman Law which enabled Frederick Barbarossa and his successors to withstand the papacy, began with Irnerius at Bologna. Again, it was Petrarch (1303- 1374) who inaugurated the far-reaching movement which claimed for literature, i. e., for poetry, rhetoric, history, and all their branches, the rank hitherto maintained by logic and philosoph.y; Dante, who crystallizes the "Summa" of St. Thomas in mirac- ulous verse, remains medieval; Petrarch is modern precisely by this difference, although we must not fancy him opposed to Church or Bible. Now when Greek manuscripts were eagerly sought after, and when Cicero dictated the canons of Latin style, the syllogism with its arena of disputation could not but give place to the orator's chair and the secretary's desk. Not science but life was the end of study. We remark no considerable achievement in metaphysics until the culminating period, both of Humanism and the Reformation, had passed away.
In 1455 the librarj- of Pope Nicholas contained 824 Latin and 352 Greek manuscripts. In 1484, at the death of Sixtus IV, the Greek MSS. had increased to one thousand. From the catalogues we infer that much interest was taken in collecting the great Fath- ers, the canon law, and medieval theology. Nicholas owned the famous Vatican Codex (B) of Holy Scrip- ture; Sixtus had in his possession fifty-eight bibles or parts of bibles. Cardinal Bessarion gave his mag- nificent stock of books to St. Mark's, Venice; and the Medicean Library, collected at Florence, where it still reposes (the Laurentian), was for a while trans- ferred to Rome by Clement VII. At Basle the Dominican cardinal, John of Ragusa, left important Greek MSS. of parts of the New Testament, which were used by Reuchlin and Erasmus with advantage. These illustrations may suffice to indicate the move- ment, becoming universal throughout Catholic Europe, towards recovery from all sides of the treas- ures of the past. Another and most important step was to print that which had been so recovered. Print- ing was a German invention. The local ordinaries and religious houses favoured it greatly. Cloisters became the home of the Press; among them we may quote Marienthal (1468), St. Ulrich, at Augsburg (1472), the Benedictines at Bamberg (1474). Typog- raphy was introduced at Brussels in 1474 by the Brothers of the Common Life. They called themselves "preachers not in word but in tj'pe". And the early printed books in Germany were of a popular devo- tional, educational, and Biblical character.
To the Renaissance in its opening stage the honour belongs of scattering broadcast the printed Latin \'ulgate as well as translations of it in most Eumiican languages, of course with approval from tlie Churcli. Ninety-eight complete editions of the Vulgate were
sent out before 1500; a dozen editions preceded the
appearance in type of any Latin classic. The first
book produced by Gutenberg was that exceedingly
beautiful "42-line" Bible according to St. Jerome's
version afterwards known as the Mazarine Bible and
still extant in several copies. The first dated Bible
came out at Mainz in 1462; the first Venetian, in
1475, was followed by twenty-one editions. The
Hebrew text was printed at Soncino and Naples
between 1477 and 1486; the Rabbinic Bible was dedi-
cated at Venice to Leo X in 1517. Cardinal Ximenes
renewed the labours of Origen by his Polyglot of
Alcald, 1514-22, which included the Greek New Tes-
tament. But Erasmus anticipated its publication by
an indifferent text in 1516. Aldus printed the Sep-
tuagint in 1518. As regards translations on the Cath-
olic side, they went on before and after Luther, from
the Spanish of Boniface Ferrer in 1405 to the English
of Douai in 1609. All these were printed; but space
will not allow more than a reference to the details
here, or to the changes in policy brought about, in
consequence of heretical translations and the abuse
of Scripture-reading, under Paul IV and the Council
of Trent. During the period commonly assigned to
the Renaissance at its height (1453-1527), freedom
was the rule. Nicholas V had it in mind to make
Rome the intellectual centre of the world. His suc-
cessors entered largely into the same idea. Pius II
(Piccolomini) was a man of letters, not unlike the
great Erasmus. Paul II, though severe upon neo-
pagans, such as Pomponazzo, did not condemn the
Classical movement. Alexander VI was a statesman,
not a scholar and not an Italian. The fierce and
splendid Julius II, himself without culture, gave
commissions to Raphael and Michelangelo, but
openly despised the pedants about his court. From
Leo X his age receives its title — he was "the incarna-
tion of the Renaissance in its most brilliant form".
An extraordinary enthusiasm for antiquity had set in, combined with boundless freedom of opinion, with a laxity of morals which has ever since given scandal to believers and unbelievers aUke, and with a festal magnificence recalling the days and nights of Nero's "golden house". The half-century which ends in the sack of Rome by Lutheran soldiers, however dazzling from a scenic point of view, cannot be dwelt on with satisfaction by any Catholic, even when we have dis- counted the enormous falsehoods long current in historians who accepted satires and party statements at their own value. Churchmen in high places were constantly unmindful of truth, justice, purity, self- denial; many had lost all sense of Christian ideals; not a few were deeply stained by pagan vices. The temper of ecclesiastics like Bembo and Bibbiena, shown forth in the comedies of this latter cardinal as they were acted before the Roman Court and imitated far and ^N-ide, is to us not less incomprehensible than disedifying. The earlier years of .Eneas Sylvius, the whole career of Rodrigo Borgia, the life of Farnese, afterwards Paul III, until he was compelled to reform himself as well as the Curia, these all exhibit the union of subtlety, vigour, and other worldly qualities, with a disregard for the most elementary \-irtues, which leaves us in dumb and sorrowful amazement. Julius II fought and intrigued like a mere secular prince; Leo X, although certainly not an unbeliever, was frivolous in the extreme; Clement VII drew on himself the contempt as well as the hatred of all who had deal- ings with him, by his crooked ways and cowardly subterfuges which led to the taking and pillage of Rome.
Now, it is not unfair to trace in these popes, as in their advisers, a certain common type, the pattern of which was Cesare Borgia, sometime cardinal, but always in mind and action a condottiere, while its philosopher was Machiavelli. We may express it in the words of Villari as a "prodigious intellectual activity accom-
