The Renaissance (14th To 16th Century) – 7

Today’s installment concludes Early Renaissance,
our selection by John Addington Symonds.

If you have journeyed through all of the installments of this series, just one more to go and you will have completed a selection from the great works of seven thousand words. Congratulations!

Previously in Early Renaissance.

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

The Reformation, like the revival of science and of culture, had its mediaeval anticipations and foreshadowings. The heretics whom the Church successfully combated in North Italy, in France and in Bohemia were the precursors of Luther. The scholars prepared the way in the fifteenth century. Teachers of Hebrew, founders of Hebrew type — Reuchlin in Germany, Alexander in Paris, Von Hutten as a pamphleteer and Erasmus as a humanist — contribute each a definite momentum. Luther, for his part, incarnates the spirit of revolt against tyrannical authority, urges the necessity of a return to the essential truth of Christianity as distinguished from the idols of the Church and asserts the right of the individual to judge, interpret, criticize and construct opinion for himself. The veil which the Church had interposed between humanity and God was broken down. The freedom of the conscience was established. The principles involved in what we call the Reformation were momentous. Connected on the one side with scholarship and the study of texts, it opened the path for modern biblical criticism. Connected on the other side with intolerance of mere authority, it led to what has since been named rationalism — the attempt to reconcile the religious tradition with the reason and to define the logical ideas that underlie the conceptions of the popular religious conscience. Again, by promulgating the doctrine of personal freedom and by connecting itself with national politics, the Reformation was linked historically to the Revolution. It was the Puritan Church in England, stimulated by the patriotism of the Dutch Protestants, which established our constitutional liberty and introduced in America the general principle of the equality of men. This high political abstraction, latent in Christianity, evolved by criticism and promulgated as a gospel in the second half of the eighteenth century, was externalized in the French Revolution. The work that yet remains to be accomplished for the modern world is the organization of society in harmony with democratic principles.

Thus what the word Renaissance really means is new birth to liberty — the spirit of mankind recovering consciousness and the power of self-determination, recognizing the beauty of the outer world and of the body through art, liberating the reason in science and the conscience in religion, restoring culture to the intelligence and establishing the principle of political freedom. The Church was the schoolmaster of the Middle Ages. Culture was the humanizing and refining influence of the Renaissance. The problem for the present and the future is how, through education, to render culture accessible to all — to break down that barrier which in the Middle Ages was set between clerk and layman and which in the intermediate period has arisen between the intelligent and ignorant classes. Whether the Utopia of a modern world in which all men shall enjoy the same social, political and intellectual advantages be realized or not, we cannot doubt that the whole movement of humanity, from the Renaissance onward, has tended in this direction. To destroy the distinctions, mental and physical, which nature raises between individuals and which constitute an actual hierarchy, will always be impossible. Yet it may happen that in the future no civilized man will lack the opportunity of being physically and mentally the best that God has made him.

It remains to speak of the instruments and mechanical inventions which aided the emancipation of the spirit in the modern age. Discovered over and over again and offered at intervals to the human race at various times and on divers soils, no effective use was made of these material resources until the fifteenth century. The compass, discovered according to tradition by Gioja of Naples in 1302, was employed by Columbus for the voyage to America in 1492. The telescope, known to the Arabians in the Middle Ages and described by Roger Bacon in 1250, helped Copernicus to prove the revolution of the earth in 1530 and Galileo to substantiate his theory of the planetary system. Printing, after numerous useless revelations to the world of its resources, became an art in 1438; and paper, which had long been known to the Chinese, was first made of cotton in Europe about 1000 and of rags in 1319. Gunpowder entered into use about 1320. As employed by the Genius of the Renaissance, each one of these inventions became a lever by means of which to move the world. Gunpowder revolutionized the art of war. The feudal castle, the armor of the knight and his battle-horse, the prowess of one man against a hundred and the pride of aristocratic cavalry trampling upon ill-armed militia, were annihilated by the flashes of the cannon. Courage became more a moral than a physical quality. The victory was delivered to the brain of the general. Printing has established, as indestructible, all knowledge and disseminated, as the common property of everyone, all thought; while paper has made the work of printing cheap. Such reflections as these, however, are trite and must occur to every mind. It is far more to the purpose to repeat that not the inventions but the intelligence that used them, the conscious calculating spirit of the modern world, should rivet our attention when we direct it to the phenomena of the Renaissance.

In the work of the Renaissance all the great nations of Europe shared. But it must never be forgotten that, as a matter of history, the true Renaissance began in Italy. It was there that the essential qualities which distinguish the modern from the ancient and the mediaeval world were developed. Italy created that new spiritual atmosphere of culture and of intellectual freedom which has been the life-breath of the European races. As the Jews are called the chosen and peculiar people of divine revelation, so may the Italians be called the chosen and peculiar vessels of the prophecy of the Renaissance. In art, in scholarship, in science, in the mediation between antique culture and the modern intellect, they took the lead, handing to Germany and France and England the restored humanities complete. Spain and England have since done more for the exploration and colonization of the world. Germany achieved the labor of the Reformation almost single-handed. France has collected, centralized and diffused intelligence with irresistible energy. But if we return to the first origins of the Renaissance, we find that, at a time when the rest of Europe was inert, Italy had already begun to organize the various elements of the modern spirit and to set the fashion whereby the other great nations should learn and live.

This ends our series of passages on Early Renaissance by John Addington Symonds. This blog features short and lengthy pieces on all aspects of our shared past. Here are selections from the great historians who may be forgotten (and whose work have fallen into public domain) as well as links to the most up-to-date developments in the field of history and of course, original material from yours truly, Jack Le Moine. – A little bit of everything historical is here.

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