A world lit only by fire: the medieval mind and the Renaissance : portrait of an age

by William Manchester

  Scholars—most of whom were theologians—continued to be fluent in classical tongues, but in the new intellectual climate that was inadequate. Publishers could no longer assume that their customers would be fluent in Latin. In past centuries, when each country had been a closed society, an author who preferred to write in the vernacular was unknown to those unfamiliar with it. No more; provincialism had been succeeded by an awareness of

  Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527)

  Europe as a comity of nations, and readers were curious about the work of foreign writers—so much so that translations became profitable. In England, for example, Brandt’s book appeared as The Ship of Fools, Van Diest’s as Everyman, Castiglione’s as The Courtier, and Machiavelli’s comedy as The Mandrake. In 1503 Thomas à Kempis’s De imitatione Christi came off London presses as The Imitation of Christ. Erasmus’s Institutio principis Christiani became available as The Education of a Christian Prince, and Hartmann Schedel’s illustrated world history was published simultaneously in Latin and German.

  Learned men became linguists. Ambrogio Calepino brought out Cornucopiae, the first polyglot dictionary, and the Collegium Trilingue was founded in Louvain. This was followed by publication, at the University of Alcalá, of a Bible in four tongues: Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and Aramaic. To be sure, none of them was widely understood in western Europe, but at least the Scriptures could, fifteen centuries after the crucifixion, be read in the language of Christ himself.

  THE DAYS WHEN the Church’s critics could be silenced by intimidating naive peasants, or by putting the torch to defiant apostates, were ending. There were too many of them; they were too resourceful, intelligent, well organized, and powerfully connected, and they were far more strongly entrenched than, say, the infidel host the crusaders had attacked. Their strongholds were Europe’s crowded, quarrelsome, thriving, and above all independent new universities.

  Before the Renaissance, Christendom’s higher education had been in hopeless disarray. Some famous institutions had been established, though their forms and curricula would be almost unrecognizable to members of twentieth-century faculties. Oxford’s earliest colleges dated from the 1200s; Cambridge had begun to emerge a century later; and for as long as Parisians could remember, groups of students had been gathering, at one time or another, in this or that quartier, on the left bank of the Seine. But they had represented no formidable force in society.

  Various chronicles enigmatically note “the beginnings” of universities in scattered medieval communities, among them Bologna, Salamanca, Montpellier, Kraków, Leipzig, Pisa, Prague, Cologne, and Heidelberg. Precisely what this meant varied from one to another. We know from Copernicus that there was learning in Kraków. He was fortunate. In most cities, academic activity had been confined to the issuance of a charter, the drawing up of rough plans, and, where students and professors met at irregular intervals, heavy emphasis on animism and Scholasticism. Animists believed that every material form of reality possessed a soul—not only plants and stones, but even such natural phenomena as earthquakes and thunderstorms. Scholastics sought to replace all forms of philosophy with Catholic theology. Both were shadowy disciplines, but there was worse: the divine right of sovereigns, for example; astrology; even alchemy; and, late in the period, Ramism.

  Within universities, there were no colleges as the term later came to be understood. Selected students lived in halls, but 90 percent of the undergraduates boarded elsewhere. They were governed by peculiar rules: athletics were forbidden, and since 1350 scofflaws at Oxford had been subject to flogging. In theory, classes began at 6 A.M. and continued until 5 P.M. In practice most students spent their time elsewhere, often in taverns. As a consequence, hostility between town and gown was often high; at Oxford one clash, which became known as the Great Slaughter, ended in the deaths of several undergraduates and townsmen.

  In those centuries students who yearned for genuine learning had to become autodidacts. Medieval universities had exalted three traditional disciplines: theology, law, and medicine, which were but distantly related to what they would later become. Courses were offered in the “arts”—grammar, logic, rhetoric, dialectics—but these were considered inferior, and were chiefly meant for youths planning to enter the lower clergy. Except in Italy, the arts teachers were usually Benedictine, Franciscan, and Dominican monks. They paid lip service to the great leaders of Hellenic and Roman culture but were largely ignorant of their works, except for selections or adaptations by scholars with an imperfect grasp of the ancient tongues. Few knew Greek; they were dependent upon Latin translations of it.

  The Latin of arts faculty members was so corrupted by scholastic and ecclesiastical overlays that it bore little resemblance to the language of Rome at its peak. They knew Ovid and Virgil, but, typically, had interpreted the Ars amatoria, the Art of Love, as they had the Song of Solomon—not as a tribute to human sensuality, but as a mystic embodiment of divine love. That was fraudulent, and because of its speciosity, the prestige of universities declined. Attendance at Oxford fell from its thirteenth-century peak to as low as a thousand in the fifteenth century. Even academic freedom vanished after the expulsion of John Wyclif, master of Balliol, in 1381. Wyclif had denounced the inordinate arrogance, wealth, and power of the Catholic clergy. Five separate bulls had condemned him, and Oxford lectures since then had been subject to rigorous episcopal control.

  The reawakening—the establishing of new ties with the gems of antiquity—was one of the great triumphs of the Renaissance. Its first seeds had been sown early in the fourteenth century, with the rediscovery of Latin classics; then the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453 gave impetus to the revival of Greek learning. Confronted with the overwhelming might of the infidels, the religious and political powers of Byzantium appealed to their fellow Christians in the West for help, even if the price was capitulation by the eastern Church to Roman orthodoxy. During the negotiations several Byzantine scholars traveled to Rome, some to participate in the talks, some merely anxious to escape the Ottoman peril. With them they brought genuine Hellenic manuscripts. For over a thousand years Italian professors fluent in Greek had assumed that the original texts of cultural masterpieces had perished. Discovering that they had survived, specialists and emissaries traveled through Croatia, Serbia, and Bulgaria to Constantinople, bearing gifts and gold and passionately searching for old manuscripts, statues, and coins, tokens of the glorious past. Thus began the transfer of priceless documents from East to West, where they joined the great Latin heritage of Italy.

  The implications reached far beyond scholarship, leading to the redefinition of knowledge itself. The eventual impact on the Continent’s hidebound educational establishment was to be devastating, discrediting medieval culture and replacing it with ancient, resurrected ideals, paideia and humanitas. The best minds in the West began a scrupulous reappraisal of Scholasticism, which, for two centuries, had been degenerating into an artificial sort of dialectics. In the ancient texts Renaissance scholars found an unsuspected reverence for humanity which, without actually dismissing the Bible, certainly overshadowed it. And in the wisdom of antiquity they discovered respect for man in the free expansion of his natural impulses, unfreighted by the corrupting burden of original sin. The Italian scholar Leonardo Bruni declared: “I have the feeling that the days of Cicero and Demosthenes are much closer to me than the sixty years just past.” Acclaim for humanity was the theme of De dignitate et excellentia, by Giannozzo Manetti, a Florentine philologist, and the Oratio de hominis dignitate, by brilliant young Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. The Christian faith was not repudiated, but the new concept of the cultivated man was the Renaissance homo universale, the universal man: creator, artist, scholar, and encyclopedic genius in the spirit of the ancient paideia.

  In that spirit Scotland and Ireland, despite their poverty, established the universities of St. Andrews, Glasgow, Aberdeen, and Trinity College, Dublin, institutions destined to pour generation after generation of first-rate men
into the intellectual life of the British Isles. Between 1496 and 1516 five new colleges were founded at Oxford and Cambridge. Meantime, across the Channel, the great transition had led to the founding of genuine, post-medieval universities at Genoa (1471), Munich (1472), Uppsala and Tübingen (1477), Copenhagen (1479), Valencia and Santiago (1501), Wittenberg (1502), and Frankfurt an der Oder (1506). Here lay the essence of the emerging intellectualism. Students like young Martin Luther, a member of the third class to enter Wittenberg, and François Rabelais, at the older but restructured Montpellier, were taught that Renaissance meant renewal, a recovery of those disciplines lost in the collapse of Roman civilization. The French refined it to la Renaissance des lettres, and though its leaders embraced more than literature—they sought the re-emergence of all the lost learning of the old world, including the flowering of art, esthetics, mathematics, and the beginnings of modern science—the heaviest emphasis was on reverence for classical letters, the poetical and philosophical Hellenic heritage, scholarly purity, and the meticulous translation of the ancient manuscripts retrieved in Athens and Rome.

  THE NEW PROFESSORS, called humanists, declared the humanities to be superior to medicine, law, and theology—especially theology. Der Humanismus, as the movement was known in Germany, its stronghold, coalesced during the last years of the Borgia papacy. In 1497, the Holy Roman emperor Maximilian I served as humanism’s midwife by appointing Conradus Celtis, a Latin lyrical poet, to the most prestigious academic chair in Vienna. Celtis used his new post to establish the Sodalitas Danubia, a center for humanistic studies, thereby winning immortality among intellectual historians as Der Erzhumaniste (the Archhumanist).

  Within a year his first manuscripts were at hand. Aldus Manutius, the great Italian printer and inventor of italic type (for an edition of Virgil), had been toiling for twenty years on the Aldine Press to produce a series of Greek classics. His editio princips, a five-volume folio Aristotle edited by Aldus himself, was in proof and ready for scholars by late 1498. During the next fourteen years it was followed by the works of all the Hellenic giants: Theocritis, Aristophanes, Thucydides, Sophocles, Herodotus, Euripides, Homer, and Plato.

  All this ferment led to that rarest of cultural phenomena, an intellectual movement which alters the course of both learning and civilization. Pythagoreans had tried it, four hundred years before the birth of Christ, and failed. So, in the third and fourth centuries A.D., had Manichaeans, Stoics, and Epicureans. But the humanists of the sixteenth century were to succeed spectacularly—so much so that their triumph is unique. They would be followed by other ideologies determined to shape the future—seventeenth-century rationalism, the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, Marxism in the nineteenth century, and, in the twentieth, by pragmatism, determinism, and empiricism. Each would alter the stream of great events, but none would match the achievements of Renaissance humanists.

  By the end of the decade following Manutius’s accomplishment, humanism had begun to replace the old curricula, dominating both the new universities and the refurbished old. Lecture halls were crowded, great libraries kept their well-worn works of humanist scholars in constant circulation, and leaders of Europe’s metropolises—merchants, lawyers, physicians, bankers, ship-owners, and the bright priests who, in the century’s fifth decade, would join the new Jesuit order—studied and discussed the newly published humanist treatises, including the denunciation of Scholasticism by England’s Thomas More, who wrote that exploring the subtleties of Scholastic philosophy was “as profitable as milking a he-goat into a sieve.”

  We picture the eminent scholars of the time, each in the short jacket favored by the professional classes then, wearing their distinctive outsized berets, the floppy brims hooding their ears, bowed over desks tilted toward them, pen and ink at hand. Poring over manuscripts and proofs in several languages, reliving the glories of the ancient past, half lost in the life of the mind, they were exalted by the awareness that they were rekindling flames extinguished in the glorious past. They cannot have been unaware of the recognition of their contemporaries. Each was a personage, admired beyond the borders of his own state, a man of substance in whom his compatriots took pride and a friend and confidant—at least in the first fifth of the century—of the Roman Catholic hierarchy. The peasant, the tradesman, the ordinary townsman, lacked the feeblest grasp of the source for the scholars’ fame, and wouldn’t have understood it if told, but he doffed his cap or tugged his forelock in the presence of such towering humanists as Pico della Mirandola of Florence, the Neapolitan Alessandro Alessandri, Genoa’s Julius Caesar Scaliger, the French philologist Guillaume Budé, the Spaniard Juan Luis Vives, John Colet and Thomas More in England, and Erasmus of Rotterdam, doyen of the movement.

  THEY CONSTITUTED the Western world’s first community of powerful lay intellectuals since Constantine’s Ecumenical Council in the fourth century A.D. Among their strengths was society’s traditional respect for learning. Anti-intellectualism as it later evolved was unknown; even the incomprehensible jabber of the Latin Mass inspired humility as well as reverence. But beyond that, the humanists were honored as though they were nobility. Since the beginning of the Renaissance, their status had risen as rulers of states and principalities singled them out, granting them perquisites reserved for the favored, establishing them as a privileged class. Ulrich von Hutten, for example, held an imperial appointment in Maximilian’s court, enjoyed the patronage of the elector of Mainz, and dined frequently with Mainz’s archbishop. Pico della Mirandola was a protégé of both Lorenzo de’ Medici and the philosopher Marsilio Ficino. Huldrych Zwingli, rector of Zurich, was a formidable political and religious leader, and so great was Budé’s prestige that Francis I founded a college at his suggestion. Girolamo Aleandro, who taught Greek and held the office of rector at the University of Paris, served as Vatican librarian, papal nuncio to France, Germany, and the Netherlands, and, finally, became a cardinal. The Vatican brought Manutius’s son Paulus to Rome as the official Vatican printer; Henry VIII chose Polydore Vergil, an Italian humanist, as his official historiographer and summoned Juan Luis Vives from Spain to tutor his daughter. Erasmus, at Cambridge, and Philipp Melanchthon, at Wittenberg, held their chairs as professors of Greek with royal approval. John Colet’s position as dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral also had royal sanction. And John Skelton, England’s poet laureate, had served as royal tutor to the future King Henry VIII, with the consequence that Henry, when he mounted the throne in 1509, was the product of a thorough humanist education.

  No humanist rose higher in public life than Sir Thomas More, who, until his fall from royal grace, was as distinguished a statesman as he was a scholar. During Henry VIII’s early reign More had been appointed undersheriff of London, king’s councillor, and a judge of the courts of requests. In 1520, when the sovereigns of England and France conferred on the Field of the Cloth of Gold outside Calais, he served as Henry’s aide. Knighted, he then rose swiftly through a series of royal appointments — undertreasurer, speaker of the House of Commons, high steward of Oxford and then of Cambridge, chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, and, finally, when he succeeded Cardinal Wolsey, lord chancellor, the foremost living Englishman, after the king, of his time.

  Erasmus, whose close friend he was, asked: “What did Nature ever create milder, sweeter, and happier than the genius of Thomas More?” But that says more about Erasmus’s generosity than More’s character. Unquestionably the Englishman was benevolent for his time, but it was not an age when men of mild and sweet disposition rose to power; a savage streak was almost a prerequisite for achievement. So it was with Sir Thomas More. He had first attracted royal notice—from Henry VII—for his skills as a Star Chamber prosecutor. In argument he was bitter, vituperative, given to streams of invective. And although as a writer he celebrated religious tolerance in his Utopia, in practice he was a rigid Catholic, capable of having a servant in his own home flogged for blasphemy. He believed that heretics, atheists, and disbelievers in a hereafter should be
executed, and as chancellor he approved such

  Sir Thomas More (1478–1535) as lord chancellor of England

  sentences. At the same time, he was a loyal subject to Henry VIII. Presiding over the House of Commons, he cannot have imagined a time when he would be forced to choose between his king in Hampton Court and the pope in Rome. But that time was coming.

  IN 1502, WHEN King Henry VII’s reign had seven years to run, his mother, Margaret Beaufort, had used her largess to found professorships of divinity at Oxford and Cambridge. Autocratic, wealthy, cultivated, and still vigorous in her late fifties, Margaret lay at the epicenter of England’s noble hierarchy. As viscountess of Richmond and Derby and a great-granddaughter of John of Gaunt, she was the paradigm of what a sovereign’s mother should be. Despite her conservatism, she welcomed change, particularly in the arts. Her country home had become a rendezvous for scholars, statesmen, poets, prelates, philosophers, and artists, and her endowment of the chairs in divinity had been inspired by her respect for the new learning as epitomized in Europe’s rising universities.

  At the same time, she remained deeply respectful of tradition. Like More, she was a staunch Catholic; it was said that she had never missed a Mass. Therefore she would have been mortified if she had known that within a generation the theologians holding her professorships would be blessed, not by the Holy See, but by her younger grandson, who as sovereign would establish an Anglican church independent of the Vatican and consecrate himself as head of it, thus becoming Christ’s vicar on the island his grandmother and forty generations of ancestors had cherished as a bastion of the only true faith.

  Virtually all humanists in the opening years of the new century shared Margaret’s reflexive loyalty to Rome. There had been a few striking exceptions, but they all had been in Germany. In that age the bewildering quilt of tiny principalities east of the Rhine was as remote to Englishmen as the Germania of Tacitus had been in Caesar’s time. Learned though Margaret Beaufort was, it is doubtful that she had even heard of Conradus Celtis, the Arch-humanist, of whom it was written that “wherever he went, he gathered students about him, and inspired them with his passion for poetry, classical literature, and antiquities.” Yet at about the time the viscountess established her chairs of divinity, this academic giant abandoned his soul by denying its existence and embraced atheism. His new lectures bore such titles as “Will the soul live after death?” and “Is there a God?” His answer to both was No.