RENAISSANCE
767
RENAISSANCE
panied by moral decay". The passion for ancient
literature, quickened and illustrated when the buried
classic marbles were brought to light, simply intox-
icated that generation. Not only did they fall away
from monastic severities, they lost all decent and manly
self-control. The survivors of a less corrupt age, as
Michelangelo in his sonnets, remind us that native
Italian genius had done great things before this new
spirit took possession of it. But there is no denying
that in its triumphant days the Renaissance looked
up to beauty, and looked away from duty, as the
standard and the law of life. It had neither eyes nor
sense for the beauty of holiness. WTien it is called
"pagan" we mean this corrupting anarchic influence,
represented more gracefully by genuine poets and
men of letters like Politian, more grossly by such
licentious singers as Lorenzo de' Medici, by Poggio,
Bandello, Aretino, and a thousand others who de-
clared that the morals of Petronius Arbiter were good
enough for them. When Savonarola in 1475 fled to
the Dominican cloister at Ferrara, and there composed
his lament on "the ruin of the Church", he cried out:
"The temple is fallen, and the house of cha.stity." But
the earthquake had not yet come. Worse things were
to happen than he had seen. And a catastrophe was
inevitable, of which he would be the prophet in St.
Mark's, Florence, sent to a partly credulous and a still
more exasperated world.
Savonarola (1453-98), Erasmus (1466-1536), and Sir Thomas More (1478-1535) may be taken as figures in what has been sometimes called the Christian Renaissance. They represent beyond question the mind of the Church concerning those ancient authors, not sacrificing faith to scholarship, or Holy Writ to Homer and Horace, while they allow to culture its province and its i)rivileges. Such w;i,s to be the lasting concordat between divinity and the humanities, but not until paganism had robbed Italy of its independ- ence, after the popes had set their house in order, and the Society of Jesus had been entrusted with the education of youth. On the strength of his protest against the unseemly and degrading literature which abounded in his time, Savonarola w;is condemned as a Puritan; his "burning of the vanities" in 1497 has been cited in proof; and he employed scathing lan- guage (see the Letter to Verino, 1497) that may be strained to this conclusion. But among his penitents were artists, poets, and learned men: Pico della Mirandola, Fra Bartolommeo, Botticelli, Michel- angelo. The friar himself bought for St. Mark's at a heavy charge the famous Medicean Library; and every candid reader will perceive in his denunciation of current books and paintings an honest Christian's outcry against cancerous vices which were sapping the life of Italy. When we come to Erasmus, no fanatic assuredly, we discover that he too made a difference between clean and unclean. Erasmus laughed to scorn the Ciceronian pedantries of Bembo and Sado- leto; he quotes with disgust the paganizing terms in which some Roman preachers travestied the persons and scenes of the Gospels. He h.ad a zeal for the in- spired Word, and his Greek and Latin New Testament was the chief literary event of the year that saw its publication. He edited St. Jerome with minute care (L516); he did something for the chief Latin Fathers, and not a little for the Greek. In his preface to St. Hilary this true scholar commends all learning, old or new, but he would have its proper value given to each department from the Scriptures even to the Schoolmen. His "Praise of Folly" and other satirical writings were an attack, not upon medieval genius, but upon the self-confiflent ignorance which declaimed against good literature without knowing what it meant. So rare and indefatigable an appraiser of literary works in ever>' form could not be insensible to the merits of St. Augustine, however nmch he de- lighted in Virgil. The scholarship of Erasmus, given
to the world in a lively Latin, was universal and often
profound. It was also honestly Christian; to make
Holy Scripture known and understood was the su-
preme purpose he kept in view. And thus the "prince
of humanists" could remain Catholic, while looking
for a moral restoration, during the whirlwind of Lu-
ther's revolt. In him the Renaissance had cast away
its paganism.
His friend, Sir Thomas More, a liberal scholar, a saint, and a martyr, proved by the enchanting courtesy of his daily converse and by the simple, almost ironical heroism which he displayed on the scaffold, how antique learning and Catholic virtue might combine in the loftiest of ideals. More's "Utopia" won a place by itself, which it still keeps, far above the imitative and passing literature of those Latin versifiers, those vain rhetoricians, who at best were scholiasts, but too commonly wasted their small talents in feebly reproducing the classic themes and metres. The English chancellor took a firm grip of social and religious problems, not so much re- garding theory as intent on reform according to Cathohc principles. He wrote Latin with greater force than elegance; his works in the vernacular have salt and savour, wit and idiom, to commend their orthodoxy. In the same category of Christian humanists we may associate with More a goodly number of Englishmen, from the Benedictines, Hadley and Selling, who were students at Padua in 1464, to Groeyn, Linacre, Colet, Fox, and the martyred Cardinal Fisher.
In Germany the first stages of revived learning had been free from Italian dissoluteness and heathen doc- trines. Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa reformed the Church, while promoting philosophy by his own speculations and collecting manuscripts. Rudolf Agricola (1443-85) united the study of the ancients with devotion to Holy Scripture; von Langen, consummate Latinist, remodelled the schools of Westphalia; he was cathedral provost at Deventer. The illustrious Wimpheling, born in 1450, taught education in principle and practice on orthodox lines. He was Reuchlin's master, a genuine scholar, zealous against the newly-imported unchristian ways of the so- called "poets"; and when Luther roi?e up, Wim- pheling opposed him as he had opposed the encroach- ments of Roman Law. With Reuchlin we are plunged into debate and controversy; but he, too, was sin- cerely religious, and in 1516 he triumphed at Rome over his adversaries, gaining thereby a victory for Hebrew erudition, which in other ways the popes had taken into favour. Many Humanists, by and by, made common cause with the Reformation; Melanchthon, Zwingli, Calvin, were eminently learned. But the Renaissance never was absorbed into any theological movement; reforming zeal scattered: libraries, emptied universities, and too often threw back education, until its first fury was spent. The spirit of which Puritanism is a complete expression had no affinity with Classic literature; at its touch the world of art, of dramatic poetry, of painting, sacred or secular, of Humanism in life and outside of schoolbooks, fell into dust. Heine (Ueber Deutschland) saw that the Reformation was, in effect, a Teutonic answer to the Renaissance; and we now perceive that, while the dogmas of Luther and Calvin have lost their hold upon men's hearts, the revival of letters is broadening out into a trans- formation of democracy by means of culture: hie labor, hoc opus ; the question how to reconcile a perfectly-equipped human life with an ascetic religion and the demands of freedom for all, is one which none of the Reformers contemplated, much less did they succeed in resolving it.
Among Frenchmen, to whom we owe the word renaissance, that problem was not mooted at first. The Italian, Aleandro, coming to Paris in 1508,
