The Cave and the Light

by Arthur Herman

Starting in the early 1300s, Europe’s Low Countries—today’s Belgium, Netherlands, and northern Germany—became the epicenter of a lay religious movement that eventually swept as far south as Italy. Newly enriched by the rebirth of trade and industry in their corner of Europe, every port and market town saw the same unprecedented explosion of private piety, even religious mysticism. The most fervent advocates and most popular authors were clerics like the German mystic Meister Eckhart (1260–1327). But its “silent majority” were laypeople, both men and women. They were the hardworking beneficiaries of Europe’s reviving commercial prosperity, and they used their affluence and social networks to build churches, found schools for boys and girls, and organize little reading groups in their homes—because with commerce and industry had come literacy for Europe’s new urban middle class.

  What did they read? Works of personal devotion and religious mysticism mostly, the majority fewer than a hundred pages. But almost all carried a strong Neoplatonist message. They read Eckhart, for example, and learned how the soul passionately seeks reunion with God. They read the anonymous mystical tract The Cloud of Unknowing. And they read Thomas à Kempis (1380–1471) and his little pamphlet The Imitation of Christ, the unexpected bestseller of the late Middle Ages that spelled out how to live day by day the “life in Christ” Origen had spoken of centuries earlier.

  The burghers of Ghent, Bruges, Beauvais, Nürnberg, and Pisa were learning that religion was about something more than rites and rituals. As Saint Bernard and his followers had taught, it rested on an inner spiritual disposition based on the love of God and the heart’s most ardent affections. People also learned that mystical union with Him belonged not just to an elite but was the normal aspiration for every soul. Well before the printing press had appeared, they understood that Holy Scripture should be the main source of meditation and inspiration for all Christians.1

  For the most part, these were quiet unassuming men and women. They went to work in their shops and counting houses, raised their children to be good Catholics, and gave generously to their local parish. If some made fortunes, they never dreamed of rising above their station or challenging existing authority. All they asked was to be left alone to pray and read their devotional tracts and follow the orthodoxies of the Church.

  Yet they also could not forget the devastating critique of the papacy and the church hierarchy unleashed in the previous century. That critique would surface in the works of the devotio moderna’s most sophisticated offspring, Erasmus of Rotterdam.2 It would reach critical mass in 1517, when the storm over papal indulgences forced these devoted and sober citizens to realize that the Church was either too timid or too arrogant to change, or both. The resulting explosion would be the Reformation. It would knock the schoolmen’s Aristotle off his throne and open a new era for the European mind.

  Until then, however, Aristotle had one vital legacy to leave.

  By a strange turn of events, Italy’s cities had been left largely to govern themselves since the Dark Ages. No great barbarian chieftain or king had managed to gain control over them, as Clovis and the Franks had in Gaul, although several had tried. Instead, merchants in these towns had formed self-governing communes to protect their wealth from marauders large and small and to secure their farms and lands. Florence, Venice, Bologna, Padua, Pisa, Genoa, and the rest had enjoyed virtual sovereignty over their territories, in defiance of both the pope in Rome and the Holy Roman Emperor.

  The coming of the Crusades had made them rich as well as independent, and made each city envious of its equally affluent neighbors. The 1200s saw fierce wars for hegemony, as when Genoa challenged Venice for control of the eastern Mediterranean and Florence crushed Pisa in battle in 1265. Not since the days of Athens and Sparta had Europe seen an era of violent civic pride like the one that covered the Italian peninsula in the age of Dante and Marco Polo.

  But then the trend changed. The days of affluence and confidence ebbed away. The coming of the Black Death in 1348, which killed off at least one-third of Italy’s population, was the coup de grâce. The wars became more desperate and the mercenary captain or condottiere, who led a city’s army to plunder its neighbors, more necessary. In one city after another, economic depression triggered social unrest and polarized communal politics. Self-government gave way to government by a single individual—the condottiere, who turned his success on the battlefield into absolute power, sometimes even a reign of terror, over the local citizenry. By the time of the Great Schism, Italy had descended back into gangster politics, as in the days of Caesar and Pompey.

  Milan was a classic case. Since the early 1300s the Visconti family had ruled the city like Mafia dons murdering their rivals and terrorizing opponents into submission. The most ruthless, and the most ambitious, of the Visconti was Gian Galeazzo. In 1385, he overthrew and murdered his uncle Bernarbò Visconti. Five years later, he decided to transform his autocratic power over the city of Milan into autocratic control of all of northern Italy.

  In swift succession his army took over the major cities of the Po River valley: Verona, Vicenza, and Padua. He paid one hundred thousand florins to the emperor for the title Duke of Milan—the first step to becoming recognized as king of Italy. For the first time since the Caesars, the boot-shaped peninsula was about to submit to the rule of a single individual: one more powerful, and more ruthless, than any pope or previous feudal figure.

  The one city that stood in Visconti’s way was Florence. By 1395 it was, with the exception of Venice, the last self-governing republic in Italy. The Florentines cherished their tradition of self-government. The city’s gonfaloniere, or mayor, its Council of Ten, and its various popular assemblies still kept the old communal ideal alive. And despite a long century of troubles, Florence was also still relatively rich. It had a strong army and a commanding presence in Tuscany. As long as Florence retained its liberty, Visconti’s plans could go nowhere.

  The Visconti coat of arms was a serpent eating a man. In the same way (or in what might be called Machiavellian fashion,) Gian Galeazzo Visconti set out his coils to encircle and devour his enemy. Florentines sensed something was up when Visconti took over Pisa to their west in 1399 and Perugia to the south in 1400. That same year, Visconti signed a nonaggression pact with the other surviving Italian republic, Venice, to the east.

  The Florentines pleaded with the Venetians not to sign. “This could cast the Florentine people into despair,” they explained, “they would feel wholly abandoned and left a prey to the tyrant.” The Venetians signed the treaty anyway.3 Florence stood alone against the Visconti threat.

  At the same time, Visconti was waging a propaganda war by portraying himself on coins and in pamphlets as the true successor to the Caesars. There had been a revival across Italy of interest in Roman history and literature since the poet Petrarch had first rediscovered the lost letters of Cicero. Visconti cast himself as the man who would bring back the stability and glory of the ancient Roman Empire. Hired propagandists compared him with Julius Caesar and talked of Visconti uniting Lombardy and Tuscany under one natural lord. They condemned Florence “in the name of every true Italian” for upholding the “enemy of quietude and peace, which they call liberty.”4

  After years of turmoil, it was a hard message to resist, even for Florentines. So Florence’s city manager, or chancellor, Coluccio Salutati, looked for ways to counteract Visconti’s propaganda and to inspire the Florentines with a renewed respect for that libertas: the right to run one’s affairs as one sees fit. Salutati was a learned man with a large library. He finally found what he needed in the works of Aristotle.

  Salutati’s Aristotle was not the Aristotle of Abelard or the scholastics, the Aristotle of logical distinctions and final causes. This was the Aristotle of the Politics and Ethics, the spokesman for the ancient polis who cast his political vision in direct opposition to Plato, and who had inspired Cicero. This triggered a major break from medieval thinking. When Thomas Aquinas read in Book III of the Politics that Aristotle
considered monarchy to be the ideal state, he assumed it was an endorsement of an institution like the Holy Roman Empire. So did Aquinas’s admirer Dante, who wrote a treatise on the subject.

  Unlike Aquinas, however, Salutati read Aristotle in the original Greek—as did his successor as chancellor, Leonardo Bruni. Together they realized that Aristotle’s ideal state was simply that: an abstraction no more applicable to real human beings like the Florentines than it was to ancient Athenians. What they found in Aristotle instead was a picture of the self-governing polis as the way of life most conformable to human nature.

  The highest form of life, Aristotle said, was that of the householder, who “as a citizen shared in the civic life of ruling and being ruled in turn.”5 That certainly sounded a lot like life in 1402 Florence as well as fifth-century BCE Athens. Furthermore, the citizen contributed to this free self-governing community in not one but two ways.

  First, he practiced the virtues of the free man, including cultivating and growing the fruits of his economic freedom—something the average Florentine merchant or shopkeeper certainly understood. Second, he contributed by becoming an active part of civic life. He voted; he ran for and held municipal office; and he entered into the honest deliberation of issues of common concern, out of which emerged laws that were binding on everyone since they enjoyed everyone’s formal consent. In Aristotle’s balanced constitution of the One, the Few, and the Many, all citizens have their role to play. All help to realize a larger goal: because “the end of the state is not mere life,” Aristotle wrote, “it is, rather, a good quality of life.”6

  In short, a democracy like Athens or a republic like Florence was a cooperative partnership, in which men agree to be the best they can be in both their public and their private lives, instead of (as in Plato’s Republic) having those rules imposed from above. Only under liberty could men realize their true nature as human beings both as free individuals and as part of a greater whole.7 This was why the ancient Athenians had defied the tyranny of Persia against all odds. This was why the early Romans had risked everything to overthrow their kings, so that they could live free or die. And that was why the Florentines had to be ready to die to defend their liberty, Leonardo Bruni concluded—because without liberty, “life [has] no meaning for them.”

  This powerful Aristotelian message also meant that the Florentines weren’t just defending their own particular liberty; they were standing up for the principle of liberty itself as it applied to humanity everywhere. As they had told the Venetians, “to us it seems all those in Italy who are anxious to live in freedom, must band together.… For it is a mistake to believe that, if one of us should fail, the other would survive.… The defense of Florence is also the defense of Venice.” Beyond that, it was a defense of the idea of civic freedom as a universal human value.8

  Fine words. But fine words didn’t prevent the Venetians from signing their pact with the tyrant of Milan, and they weren’t going to defeat Gian Galeazzo’s advancing juggernaut. In July, his army crushed a combined Florentine-Bolognese force, and Bologna was forced to throw open its gates to the conqueror. As August began, Gian Galeazzo’s knights and pikemen were concentrating along the border of Florence. Like Britain in 1940, Florence stood completely alone.

  No one thought of surrender. “Even though the troops which we had at Bologna were destroyed,” said one council member at the height of the crisis, “we must courageously go on.” Another spoke in Churchill-like tones as the Florentines braced for the final blitz and invasion: “Let our minds not be subdued, but roused” by the danger ahead, and “face it with courage rather than fear.”9

  On August 10, Gian Galeazzo called together his war council. He appeared pale and distracted. He was ill with a fever; his doctors told him to take to his bed. The invasion was postponed. Over the next several days Visconti took a turn for the worse; and on September 3, 1402, the would-be king of Italy died. His heirs quarreled over their inheritance. Within weeks Gian Galeazzo’s empire crumbled away, and his armies scattered into the countryside. Florence was saved.

  To the Florentines, it was obvious what had happened. They had been saved by a divine miracle. But it was also a divine judgment: a vindication of their way of life and liberty itself. Everything that made Florence a free society—from its constitution to its trade and commerce, along with its arts and scholarship—had received a powerful sanction. “To be conquered and become subjects,” wrote historian Gregorio Dati, recalling his hometown’s great crisis, “this never seemed to the Florentines a possibility.”10 And now God had put His stamp of approval on their resolve.

  The result was a sudden upsurge of confidence and energy in all aspects of Florentine life. That same year, Filippo Brunelleschi and his friend Donatello went to Rome to study the beauties of classical architecture and sculpture. Upon his return Brunelleschi began work on his great dome for Florence’s cathedral, and in 1403, Lorenzo Ghiberti started casting the great bronze doors for the baptistry. The following years saw the arrival of a new, classically based architecture designed by Brunelleschi and Leon Battista Alberti; new works of history by Bruni and Gregorio Dati; a new figurative style of painting in the works of Masaccio; and a new lifelike classicism in the sculptures of Donatello.

  All this creative outflow—the product of a post-1402 generation of Florentines eager to celebrate their political liberty and its unleashing of human potential—we call the Renaissance. Thanks to the Florentines’ reading of Aristotle, a new way of seeing the world had been born, and with it a new appreciation of civic freedom.

  Of course, it drew from deeper sources than just the crisis of 1402. Florentine traditions of pictorial realism dated back at least to Giotto, and classical architectural elements had been preserved in Italian city life since the fall of the Roman Empire. A tradition of political freedom had been preserved as well, in the works of Cicero, which scholars in Italy had been reading since the 1100s.11

  Italy was also home to the rediscovery of Roman civil law during the Middle Ages, which had given Italians a version of liberty that was summed up in the phrase coined by the great legal scholar Bartolus (also a key figure in the conciliarist debate along with William of Ockham) that “a free people is its own prince.”12†

  All the same, what was missing from Roman law, and even from Cicero, was the idea that living in freedom was a universal human value transcending all local traditions and historical contexts. It was precisely this sense of freedom as an essential part of human nature and potentiality that the Florentines had discovered in Aristotle and passed on to subsequent generations. The conclusion was clear: to be human was to desire to be free. Being free in turn meant living under a constitution in which men “rule and are ruled in turn” and by choosing their own leaders, chose their own collective destiny.

  The Florentine rediscovery of Aristotle’s politics of freedom signaled the birth of a new ideal for Europe.14 It asserted that the highest form of human life was that of the free active citizen, just as the free self-governing republic is the form of political life most suited to human nature. In this way, it was believed, liberty opens the door to a standard of excellence in both public and private affairs unknown to those living in servitude or unfree societies. In short, a republic built on Aristotle’s model will allow men to achieve their highest potential not only as political animals, but as complete moral beings.

  The Florentines saw this happening in their own city. They had a constitution (they felt) that achieved the kind of balance between the One, the Few, and the Many that Aristotle made the hallmark of successful self-government. They were witnessing a flourishing of the arts and a standard of aesthetic perfection in the works of Donatello, Brunelleschi, and Masaccio not realized since ancient Athens, while Florentines also led the rest of Italy in the study and recovery of classical texts, including the works of the ancient Greeks.‡

  In Florence “liberty exists for all,” wrote Bruni, and “the hope of winning public honors and ascending is the
same for all.” This equality of opportunity awakens the talents of the citizens, “for where men are given the hope of attaining honor in the state, they take courage and raise themselves to a higher plane” so that “talent and industry distinguish themselves in the highest degree.”15

  When asked why all the key ingredients of Renaissance culture first appeared in Florence, the artist Vasari said it was due to the city’s freedom, which inspired the spirit of criticism: “the air of Florence making minds naturally free, and not content with mediocrity.”16 The ultimate goal was summed up by the title of a work of another Florentine scholar, Giannozzo Manetti, On the Dignity and Excellence of Man, meaning the dignity and excellence of the free individual.

  Renaissance Florence did not forget about the importance of Christianity and sacred values. It was said that Manetti knew three works by heart: the Ethics of Aristotle, Saint Paul’s letters, and Augustine’s City of God.17 Still, the Florentines did insist that education needed to reflect the new secular emphasis on human freedom and the pursuit of excellence for its own sake. Leonardo Bruni’s term for this new program of learning suitable to the free active citizen was studia humanitatis, literally “the study of humanity.” We call it the humanities, and the humanists who devoted their lives to it managed to lift the traditional liberal arts of their scholastic morass like a submerged yacht being pulled out of the mud.

  Instead of the old trivium and quadrivium, the Renaissance humanist focused on only four subjects. The first was the study of history, in order to understand free nations in the past, especially ancient Greece and Rome. The second was the study of rhetoric in order to make men fit to lead a free society—not surprisingly, since the typical humanist saw Cicero as well as Aristotle as his ancient mentor. Then there was Greek and Roman literature to raise men’s standard of eloquence, and finally moral philosophy, which meant above all Aristotle’s Ethics.18 Studia humanitatis were the four parts of the essential tools of freedom, training the minds of men to see the pursuit of excellence as an expression of their essential nature, whether in the past or the future.