The Renaissance (14th To 16th Century) – 6

Then came the third age of scholarship — the age of the critics, philologers and printers.

Continuing Early Renaissance,
our selection from John Addington Symonds. The selection is presented in seven easy 5 minute installments.

Previously in Early Renaissance.

Time: 14th. To 16th. Century
Place: Italy

Then came the third age of scholarship — the age of the critics, philologers and printers. What had been collected by Poggio and Aurispa had now to be explained by Ficino, Poliziano and Erasmus. They began their task by digesting and arranging the contents of the libraries. There were then no short cuts of learning, no comprehensive lexicons, no dictionaries of antiquities, no carefully prepared thesauri of mythology and history. Each student had to hold in his brain the whole mass of classical erudition. The text and the canon of Homer, Plato, Aristotle and the tragedians had to be decided. Greek type had to be struck. Florence, Venice, Basel and Paris groaned with printing-presses. The Aldi, the Stephani and Froben toiled by night and day, employing scores of scholars, men of supreme devotion and of mighty brain, whose work it was to ascertain the right reading of sentences, to accentuate, to punctuate, to commit to the press and to place, beyond the reach of monkish hatred or of envious time, that everlasting solace of humanity which exists in the classics. All subsequent achievements in the field of scholarship sink into insignificance beside the labors of these men, who needed genius, enthusiasm and the sympathy of Europe for the accomplishment of their titanic task. Vergil was printed in 1470, Homer in 1488, Aristotle in 1498, Plato in 1512. They then became the inalienable heritage of mankind. But what vigils, what anxious expenditure of thought, what agonies of doubt and expectation, were endured by those heroes of humanizing scholarship, whom we are apt to think of merely as pedants! Which of us now warms and thrills with emotion at hearing the name of Aldus Manutius or of Henricus Stephanus or of Johannes Froben? Yet this we surely ought to do; for to them we owe in a great measure the freedom of our spirit, our stores of intellectual enjoyment, our command of the past, our certainty of the future of human culture.

This third age in the history of the Renaissance scholarship may be said to have reached its climax in Erasmus; for by this time Italy had handed on the torch of learning to the northern nations. The publication of his Adagia in 1500 marks the advent of a more critical and selective spirit, which from that date onward has been gradually gaining strength in the modern mind. Criticism, in the true sense of accurate testing and sifting, is one of the points which distinguish the moderns from the ancients; and criticism was developed by the process of assimilation, comparison and appropriation, which was necessary in the growth of scholarship. The ultimate effect of this recovery of classic culture was, once and for all, to liberate the intellect. The modern world was brought into close contact with the free virility of the ancient world and emancipated from the thraldom of improved traditions. The force to judge and the desire to create were generated. The immediate result in the sixteenth century was an abrupt secession of the learned, not merely from monasticism but also from the true spirit of Christianity. The minds of the Italians assimilated paganism. In their hatred of mediaeval ignorance, in their loathing of cowled and cloistered fools, they flew to an extreme and affected the manner of an irrevocable past. This extravagance led of necessity to a reaction — in the North, of Puritanism; in the South, to what has been termed the Counter-Reformation effected under Spanish influences in the Latin Church. But Christianity, that most precious possession of the modern world, was never seriously imperiled by the classical enthusiasm of the Renaissance; nor, on the other hand, was the progressive emancipation of the reason materially retarded by the reaction it produced.

The transition at this point to the third branch in the discovery of man, the revelation to the consciousness of its own spiritual freedom, is natural. Not only did scholarship restore the classics and encourage literary criticism; it also restored the text of the Bible and encouraged theological criticism. In the wake of theological freedom followed a free philosophy, no longer subject to the dogmas of the Church. To purge the Christian faith from false conceptions, to liberate the conscience from the tyranny of priests and to interpret religion to the reason, has been the work of the last centuries; nor is this work as yet by any means accomplished. On the one side, Descartes and Bacon and Spinoza and Locke are sons of the Renaissance, champions of new-found philosophical freedom; on the other side, Luther is a son of the Renaissance, the herald of new-found religious freedom. The whole movement of the Reformation is a phase in that accelerated action of the modern mind which at its commencement we call the Renaissance. It is a mistake to regard the Reformation as an isolated phenomenon or as a mere effort to restore the Church to purity. The Reformation exhibits, in the region of religious thought and national politics, what the Renaissance displays in the sphere of culture, art and science — the recovered energy and freedom of humanity. We are too apt to treat of history in parcels and to attempt to draw lessons from detached chapters in the biography of the human race. To observe the connection between the several stages of a progressive movement of the human spirit and to recognize that the forces at work are still active, is the true philosophy of history.

Continued.

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