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                          CHAPTER XXVI

              The Renaissance: A European Awakening

        The End of the Nightmare -- The Call of Greece --
   The Papacy and the Renaissance -- The Spirit of Humanism --
                 Erasmus and the Other Humanists

                    THE END OF THE NIGHTMARE

     RENAISSANCE is the French word for Rebirth. In its earliest
use in history it referred to the revival in Italy of the ancient
Roman architecture. Other countries had adopted the Gothic style,
but the Italians preferred the purer lines of the old temples,
whose stately remains still rose from the soil of their country to
rebuke the barbarism of the new era.

     Later historians, observing that it was not the pagan
architecture alone that was reborn in the later Middle Ages, used
the word Renaissance in a much broader sense. They meant by it the
Rebirth of Greek and Roman literature and ideals as well as art,
chiefly in the fifteenth century. That is the proper meaning of the
word, but modern writers give it a still wider significance. The
Rebirth of the classical spirit and literature was part of a very
widespread "revival of intelligence, knowledge, refinement, and
conscious mastery of life" so the Renaissance has come to mean the
Rebirth of Civilization out of the darkness of the Middle Ages. It
means to modern historians the entire transition from the Middle
Age to the Modern Age, the Awakening.

     This division of the Christian Era into Classic Age, Middle
(or Dark) Age, and Modern Age does not flatter Christianity. It
suggests that civilization was suspended during the long period
between the death and the resurrection of paganism: that
Christendom was coarse, brutal, and ignorant until the spirit of
Greece and Rome restored it to some sense of dignity and humanity.
And as our literature of general information is now largely written
by anonymous priests and by literary men who would close like
oysters if you asked them merely in what century Charlemagne lived,
some singular ideas about the Renaissance are in circulation. In
unexpected places you get smiling assurances that the "old history"
was quite wrong: that now the splendor of the Catholic Middle Age
is fully recognized, and the "tinsel" of the Renaissance is
estimated at its true value. A Catholic writer (not an historian,
of course) who was entrusted with the Renaissance in a recent
series of manuals for the general public, wonders, with the grave
air of a Michelet or a Gibbon, whether it did not do more harm than
good!

     Unfortunately, historical writers often use language which
these propagandists can quote. On the specious plea that history,
like art, must be neutral, we find extraordinary concessions made
to a false version of human events. Moreover, modern history is so
specialized that it can hardly realize its own aim of taking broad
views. No recent work on the Renaissance is equal even in
historical truth, to say nothing of the appalling contrast in
literary quality, to the superb study, written fifty years ago, by
John Addington Symonds, "The Renaissance in Italy," and none
approaches Jacob Burckbardt's "Civilization of the Renaissance in
Italy" in detailed knowledge of the period. No one today, however,

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can find leisure to read a seven-volume work, like that of Symonds,
and in a sense his beautiful and true study of the spirit of the
Renaissance requires a correction. The blaze of his period so fills
his eyes that all the previous history of Europe seems to him
uniformly dark.

     The finest recent study ought to be the first volume of the
"Cambridge Modern History," which is entitled "The Renaissance."
Unfortunately, it is not an analysis of the Renaissance and its
meaning, but mainly a chronicle of the wars and other familiar
"historical events" which occurred during the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries; and its deliberate concessions to possible
Roman Catholic readers, by inviting men like Canon W. Barry to
contribute, make it in some degree historically false. Mr. S.
Dark's recent "Story of the Renaissance" is similarly a piece of
Catholic propaganda and is unreliable. The last edition of
Professor W.H. Hudson's "Story of the Renaissance" (1924) is still
the best manual of moderate dimensions.

     Here we take the Renaissance as a stage in the evolution of
Christendom, and a most important stage. What every thoughtful
person wants to know is, not what antics the French kings played in
Naples, but what is the religious meaning of this fact, now
endorsed by all historians, that civilization, or a higher
civilization, was not reborn in Europe until a thousand years after
the adoption of Christianity: what is the exact relation of the
Christian creed or Church to the previous barbarism and the later
revival.

     Academic historians often evade this unpleasant issue by
gibing at "popular writers" who describe Europe as sunk in barbaric
sloth until the revival of Greek literature in the fifteenth
century, which is the main period of the Renaissance. Symonds
thinks that the period proper is 1450 to 1500; others take the
whole fifteenth century; and others -- most recent writers -- a
period of two or three centuries. It depends on the precise sense
in which you take the word Renaissance, and it is well to remember
that it has two definite meanings -- the revival of classical
literature and the revival of civilization.

     Now it is an essential part of my program that the awakening
began long before the fifteenth century. After a few centuries of
barbarism Europe was constantly endeavoring to rouse itself from
its torpor, but -- this is what the academic historians will not
clearly say -- the Church murderously suppressed every attempt.
Bogomiles, Catharl, Albigensians, Patarenes, Lollards, Hussites,
and Luciferists (witches), representing millions of heretics, are
just symptoms of the very widespread effort of Christendom, from
the tenth century onward, to civilize itself in spite of
Christianity; and the successful secularization of architecture,
sculpture, painting, teaching, law, etc., is another symptom. Let
me, as we are now passing from the Middle Ages to modern times,
give a further and final illustration.

     Historical writers who diplomatically, and with fatal effect,
borrow a phrase or two from "Catholic historians" speak of the
guilds as "inspired by the Church" (they were of pagan origin and


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the Church fought them for a century), the schools and philanthropy
of the monasteries (which were generally colonies of sensual and
slothful parasites, who rarely had schools even for themselves),
the wonderful art of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (which
became wonderful only when it was secularized), and Dante.

     I doubt whether any of these Catholic writers who enthuse
about Dante ever read him. The third part of the "Divine Comedy"
is, as Goethe bluntly said, "insipid." It is precisely a proof that
pure Christian doctrine cannot inspire poetry. The other two parts
are made interesting -- Goethe says "repulsive" -- by their
material setting, but they are absolutely heretical from the
Catholic point of view.

     Read Canto iv of the "Inferno." Before entering hell proper,
Dante comes to a "noble castle," with a charming "meadow of fresh
verdure," and finds a number of "great spirits" leading a life of
ghostly dignity and tranquillity in this desirable home. Their only
punishment is that they are not allowed the "Beatific Vision" (of
God) which makes up the bliss of Paradise. (And from Dante's
description of this in his third book, I should say that they must
have been profoundly grateful for the exclusion from heaven, for an
eternity of such bliss, with no throat to cut, is a lot to which I
would not condemn even Innocent III or Anthony Comstock.) These
"great spirits," whom Dante honors with all his art, are the great
pagans of Greece and Rome, the Moorish thinkers Avicenna and
Averroes, and even Saladin, the deadly foe of Christianity!

     In the next Canto, which describes the first circle of hell,
with the very lightest punishments of that divine invention, Dante
puts Semiramis and Cleopatra, Dido and Francesca, and all the
prettier women known to history who lived in what the theologian
calls the deadliest of sins, impurity. Throughout his "Inferno" and
"Purgatorio," Dante classifies sins and sinners, not according to
Christian teaching, but according to the social moral standard of
Cicero and Aristotle.

     And the meaning of this bold heresy of "the great Catholic
poet" can be gathered from Canto x. It describes the quarter of
hell, and by no means the worst quarter, where dwell "Epicurus and
all his followers, who make the soul die with the body." Amongst
these Dante puts the greatest monarch of the thirteenth century,
Frederick II, the famous Cardinal Negli Ubaldini, and "more than a
thousand" other Italians of his time! In this glorious thirteenth
century, in other words, Florence was, in spite of the Inquisition,
a hotbed of radical skepticism. Indeed, there is very strong reason
to believe that Pope Boniface VIII, who crowns the century, was an
utter skeptic.

     Let us now go back to the early part of the century, when Pope
Innocent III inaugurated the practice of murdering people who would
not profess to believe what they did not believe.

     We read that in the opening years of his reign Innocent had to
fly from Rome, driven out of his city by anti-clerical democrats.
We follow the clue and learn that in the twelfth century a fiery
and noble-minded ex-monk, Arnold of Brescia, induced the Romans to


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throw off the authority of corrupt priests and establish the first
Republic in the world since pagan days. He was, of course, hanged
for this vile transgression of the ethic of Christ; yet fifty years
later the democrats of Rome were still strong enough to make the
aristocratic Innocent fly for his life. And I presume you never
even heard of that splendid little man, Arnold of Brescia, or of
the democratic movement in the heart of Christendom nearly four
centuries before the time of Luther.

     We may, in fact, divide "the Christian Era" into four parts.
I may use round numbers, as they are near enough to the facts to
justify me in thus simplifying the history of Christendom. The
first section (1 to 500 A.D.) was not a Christian Era; during
three-fourths of it Christians were a small and despised minority,
and they won the majority only by the use of force. The next five
hundred years (500 to 1000) were the Nightmare; not even the most
ingenious historian of our time who wishes to distinguish himself
by correcting his predecessors has attempted to lighten the
darkness and mitigate the horrors of that real and only Christian
Era. The next five hundred years (1000 to 1500) are the Awakening.
To our positive knowledge hundreds of thousands, and probably
millions, had to be killed by the Church to prevent Europe from
rejecting its tyranny. And the period 1500-2000 is the Dawn. It
opens with the destruction of one-half of the Papal dominion; it
sees irreligion broadening and deepening in each century; it
already finds the Christian majority turned into a minority in
every great civilization; its close will see the end of
Christianity.

     Christendom awoke, first, because a nation or a race does not,
any more than an individual, sleep forever. One must not suppose
that the terrible reaction from the fifth to the twelfth century is
without parallel in history. Egypt twice fell into some such
confusion, though apparently not to such a depth of degradation, in
the course of its long history. China and India and Persia have
similar periods. They awoke by the action of their own political
and economic forces. Men find that order is preferable to disorder,
wealth is preferable to poverty, security of life and property is
better than lawlessness. The economic vitality of Europe again
gathered in the condensations which we call towns. Wealth made for
art and refinement, and a class of lay artists, teachers, and
writers arose, who wrested what was called art and learning from
the monks and raised them to a higher level.

     Secondly, there was a very material awakening force which
hardly any writer on the Renaissance properly appreciates; the
stimulation of the Moorish civilization. The fact that Dante
mentions with honor Avicenna and Averroes does lead some historians
to remark, in a foot-note, that there was a civilization in Spain;
but few seem to be aware that when he mentions Homer, all the Greek
philosophers from Thales to Zeno, Euclid and Ptolemaeus, Galen and
Hippocrates, he is borrowing from the Mohammedans. No one in his
time in Italy knew Greek or had Greek books. The group of skeptical
scholars in Florence to which Dante at first belonged, and whose
influence he never entirely escaped, owed their culture to the
Mohammedans of southern Italy or of Spain. The third awakening



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factor was the influence of Greek and Roman literature. These are
the three fundamental influences in the Rebirth of civilization,
and the other causes assigned are either effects of them or are of
little importance.

     The Crusades are often vaguely quoted as having contributed to
the civilization of Europe, since they enabled the boorish
Christian knights to see what civilization really was, in the
refined Mohammedan world. But the influence of this hostile clash
was trivial compared with the peaceful penetration of Europe by the
Moors and Jews. One does not learn much on a battlefield except how
to fight.

     The astronomical revolution, the discovery that the sun is the
center of the solar system, is given as a factor by all writers. It
is one of the three causes of the Renaissance given by Professor
Hudson; the others are printing and the discovery of new lands
overseas. These two events are rather parts of the general
awakening, or effects of the deeper causes I have assigned. As to
the "Copernican Revolution," the effect of which modern writers
fancifully exaggerate, it had no share whatever in the Italian
Renaissance (which is regarded as ending in 1500 or 1520) and
little elsewhere. The work of Copernicus did not appear until 1543,
and its contents were known to very few until the days of Kepler
and Galileo. Europe was then awake.

     Much stress is laid also on the decay of the idea of a
universal empire and a universal Church. Symonds thought that this
lifted a burden of despotism from the minds of men and fostered the
spirit of initiative and independence. It sounds rather fanciful.
The classic revival would favor the idea of a universal empire; and
certainly the monarchs of France, England, Spain, etc., were as
despotic as the emperors had been. As to the idea of a universal
Church, there had been wide revolts against it ever since the tenth
century, but there were less in the fifteenth century than before.
The Inquisition seemed to have triumphed. It was the corruption
rather than the tyranny of the Church that stirred men.

     If we admitted any fourth fundamental cause of the
Renaissance, it should be the realization of the corruption of the
Church. It fired Humanists like Petrarch and Erasmus as much as it
fired Luther and Melanchthon. It was the deepest and most
persistent cause of revolt, But the Renaissance was a rebellion of
a very special kind. It is not in the same line of evolution with
the big democratic movements of the Bogomiles, Albigensians,
Lollards, Hussites, and Protestants. It was sensual, aristocratic,
and scholarly; they were ascetic, democratic, and simple. Its
standard was the pagan ideal; theirs was, generally, the Bible. The
Renaissance was the beginning of modern times, if we think
especially of the modern spirit; the Reformation, taking men back
to Christ and the Bible, essentially rebuked it, and postponed its
development.

     It was a great half-century, that culminating period of the
Renaissance, from 1450 to 1500. Every step in advance made the way
easier, and put pride and joy into the heart of the wayfarer.
Printing and piper gave a marvelous opportunity to the new ambition


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to spread knowledge. I do not compare it with the nineteenth
century -- I repeat that in the nineteenth century the world saw
more progress than it had ever before seen in a thousand years --
because science was too feeble to advance much, and because the
Renaissance did little directly for the mass of the race. Ninety
percent of the people of Europe remained illiterate, miserably
poor, practically serfs. Catholic writers who point out this, and
charge the Renaissance with aristocratic selfishness, have no sense
of humor. Their church had made ninety percent of the people so
ignorant and coarse. The Renaissance, which would in time have
helped them (it greatly enlarged the artisan class) -- was checked
by the old Church as well as the new or Lutheran Church. But it put
a spirit into Europe; it gave a thirst for knowledge; it lit up a
vision of science, which would never again perish. Our age is the
son of the Renaissance.

                       THE CALL OF GREECE

     Of the three fundamental causes of the awakening, I fully
described the second, the inspiration of Mohammedan civilization,
in the last chapter. The first cause I assigned, the internal
economic development of Europe, is a matter that would require a
large volume. I have lightly sketched it, but most readers will
understand it even without the historical details. The
consolidation of the new monarchies and republics of Europe brought
about a more settled, a more protected life. The population
increased and got more out of the soil. Market centers became
towns, then cities. By the time of the Renaissance Italy had cities
of a hundred thousand to two hundred thousand people. Cities meant
wealth, leisure, thinking, luxury, art. Regular international
relations promoted travel and commerce. The artisan class and the
middle class greatly increased.

     And when we remember that during all this time, from the ninth
century onward, travelers were bringing into Christendom stories of
the high culture and prosperity of Spain, we realize that Europe
was bound to return to a fair level of civilization. Then occurred
what we call the Renaissance in the stricter sense, the revival of
classical literature, and it had a most important influence.

     Europe had almost no Greek works and only an imperfect
collection of the Latin classics. Catholic writers now remind us
how (for reasons of Church policy) the Council of Vienne had in
1311 ordered the teaching of Greek and how this or that scholar of
the Middle Ages knew Greek. As Sir R. Jebb says, "Several scholars"
in the course of "several centuries" knew a little Greek -- a fine
record, surely -- and not a single teacher was appointed after the
Council of Vienne. No priest could read the New Testament in Greek.
It was a dead language. Religious bitterness had raised an
insuperable barrier between eastern and western Christendom. Even
the Latin classics had so fallen into obscurity that the Humanists,
as we call the scholars of the Renaissance, had infinite trouble in
making collections of them.

     Petrarch (1304-1374) is regarded as the first Humanist. The
English poet, Chaucer, is often said to have been the morning star
of Humanism, but the word is then taken in a broader sense.
Petrarch is counted as the founder of the classical Renaissance.

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     However, there was a good deal of Humanism in Italy before the
time of Petrarch, and his zeal for the classics was a direct
outcome of it. Frederick II had done everything in his power to
foster the intellectual revival. From his youth, when Pope Innocent
III had been his guardian and had taken shameless advantage of his
position, Frederick had learned to despise the Church; and he had
later appreciated the far higher civilization of the Saracens.
through his influence Florence and the other growing cities of
Italy had begun to treasure lay culture and independent thinking,
and had acquired the veneration of paganism that is reflected in
Dante.

     For men, the moment they began to reflect, saw three things:
the degradation of Christendom, the corruption of the Church, and
(if they had any learning) the superiority of Greece and Rome.
Indeed, we must not forget that the really religious Popes,
bishops, and monks did more harm than the corrupt majority. Gregory
VII and Innocent III did incalculable injury to human interests;
and the more pious monks were the men who thrust the classics out
of sight and kept art and literature in swaddling clothes. The
truculent austerity of the good Christians was as irksome as the
hypocrisy of the others.

     What really characterizes the new movement, from the
thirteenth century onward, is the scorn of hypocrisy. Modern pagan
writers on the Renaissance, like Symonds and Pater, describe, with
equal elegance and feeling, how the Renaissance was an assertion of
man's right to beauty and love. Catholic writers entirely agree in
this -- though, boasting of medieval art, as they do, they would
rather say sensuality and love -- and they appeal to the puritanism
of modern times to see in the Renaissance only an outburst of
immorality. Both are right -- and wrong. Symonds never quite
explains how this assertion of the right to beauty and love was
related to men's religious belief; and the Catholic never explains
how it was that his religion rose to its greatest height in the
thirteenth century (he says), only to be followed at once by the
license of the Renaissance.

     There was a continuous intellectual revolt against the
Christian religion long before the Renaissance, and there was a
revolt of the heart, an assertion of the right to beauty and love,
all the time since the fourth century. All through its history
Christendom was generally and profoundly immoral. The difference
was that in the earlier period the taste was coarser and the right
to love was not regarded as an admitted right, but an encroachment
on God's rights. Old-age or death-bed repentance or clerical
incantations would put matters straight. It was a stupid frame of
mind, the result of forcing upon human nature a creed which was
really unnatural.

     With the growth of intellectual life men became clearer-
headed. We must remember always that we are speaking of a minority
-- the few who could read. All through these changes which
fascinate the historian -- the triumph of Christianity in the
fourth century, the Renaissance, the Reformation, etc. -- the
overwhelming mass of the people remained unchanged. The names in
their prayers changed, that was all. But the thoughtful minority


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began to conceive God much like H.G. Wells conceives his Invisible
King: he was not interested in small matters like love affairs. The
Church, with its massive and general hypocrisy in regard to sex,
was evidently a human business. The laity felt itself free; free to
paint the human figure in all its fleshiness, as Giotto did; free
to depict human joviality as it was, as Rabelais did; free to love,
as people had hitherto illicitly done. It is absurd to say that
there was a growth of immorality after the revival of Greek
literature. It had no margin for growth. Now, however, in
cultivated men, it was a deliberate act, on principle, and
therefore not immoral.

     Petrarch, the first of the Humanists, was the son of a
Florentine lawyer who seems to have belonged to the cultivated
circle which venerated pagan Rome. He had manuscript works of the
old Latin writers, and Petrarch was reared in a high regard for
these. After a time he settled near Avignon, where the Papal court
then was, and the sordid hypocrisy of its puritan creed and open
vices -- unnatural vice was common amongst the clerics, from the
cardinals downward, though women were as numerous as pages --
intensified his veneration for Cicero. The Roman orator's sober and
reasoned work "On Duty" (the chief moral authority used by Dante)
gave a plainer map of life than did this ecclesiastical
organization that lived by "the fable of Jesus Christ" (as a later
Pope said) and outraged every letter of his teaching. Petrarch
searched everywhere for, and got other men to seek, more fragments
of the old Latin literature. He was a Christian and in orders, but
he was clearly very independent of the actual teaching of the
Church. It was too obviously human.

     The Romans, Petrarch soon found, had candidly represented the
Greeks as far greater thinkers than themselves, and he turned to
Greece. The story of those days is a singular commentary on the
worn legend, which one still finds in magazines and books, that the
monks preserved the classics. When the Humanists began, there was
very little even of Latin literature on the market. They had to
spend whole lives traveling from town to town, and monastery to
monastery, sifting the rubbish to find manuscript copies of the old
Roman writers. Greek was a dead language in Europe, and scarcely
anybody could have read or copied a Greek manuscript. Petrarch
learned a little Greek from an Italian who had been some years in
Greece, but there was no such thing as a grammar or dictionary, and
he could never read the language.

     Contemporary with Petrarch was his friend Boccaccio (1313-
1375), author of the "Decameron": a serious scholar who was much
prouder of his learned works than of his stories. At the
instigation of Petrarch he took up the study of Greek and even made
a bad translation of Homer. Rich merchants were interested. The
ambition arose to have collections of manuscript books. What we
call "the Greek spirit" was discussed in literary gatherings, and
to those men and women of the Middle Ages, living in a world of
weird speculation and peculiar dogmas, it seemed as new and
characteristic as Omar Khayyam seemed to moderns when he was first
translated.




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     The Humanists recognized that the Greek spirit was the guide
they needed. The real history of Judaism and early Christianity was
quite unknown in those days, but educated men felt that there was
something wrong in the account which the Church gave of itself and
its authority. The Greeks gave them a sane and balanced creed.
Strictly speaking, there is no single Greek spirit. The spirit of
Plato is not the spirit of Aristotle; the spirit of the Stoics is
so different from that of the Epicureans that the rivals fought
bitterly. But there is the common element that they all speculate
in complete independence of religious traditions. They make man his
own oracle and legislator. They exalt human nature and natural law.
They reflect a civilization in which there was a general
cultivation of beauty and wisdom; a glorification of the human body
in art, of nature in poetry, of the intellect in science and
philosophy. This was just the note for awakening Christendom. Human
nature felt that it had been oppressed and exploited. The Greeks
gave it its Magna Charta, formulated its Rights of Man,

     But we must be careful not to exaggerate. Down to the end of
the fourteenth century and long after, only a few hundred people
were involved in this new Humanism, whereas the Lollards, Hussites
and witches (or Luciferists) must have numbered well over a
million. Very few people could read, and so rebellion generally
took the form of an appeal to the Gospels against the usurped
authority and corruption of the Church.

     I am not going to complicate this simple sketch by giving all
the names and dates of the Humanists. In short, the living Greeks
before the end of the fourteenth century discovered this new zeal
for their old literature and began to encourage it and profit by
it. A well-educated Greek, Manuel Chrysoloras, came to Italy on a
diplomatic mission in 1391, and the cultured group at Florence
prevailed on him to stay there and teach Greek. He wrote the first
Greek grammar. Other Greeks now came over to earn a living by
teaching, and chairs were set up in all the leading cities of
Italy. Italians went to Constantinople, to learn the language at
its source. The Turks were now pressing the Greeks very hard, and
it was discovered that the fact that the western Christians were a
little heretical as regards the procession of the Holy Ghost did
not really matter so much -- now that the Greek Empire was in
danger. Traffic across the Adriatic increased, and the zeal for
Greek spread into Italy. It is related of Guarino, one of the
Humanists, that, when his precious Greek manuscripts were lost in
a shipwreck on his way back from Constantinople, his hair turned
white in a day.

     This was the great age of the Medici family at Florence, and
the wealth which the bankers had accumulated, and the social and
political power which the family acquired, were used on behalf of
the new culture. Greek tutors were engaged for the Medici boys.
Zeal for classical culture opened the door of the palace more
easily than wealth or piety. Florence was becoming the wonderful
city, the new Athens, which is so frequently described in George
Eliot's "Romola." The "Cambridge Modern History" makes the point,
which is worth noting, that Florence was not at all a city of vice.
It was noted for its general sobriety and its disgust with the



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corruption of Rome. Other cities -- Genoa, Venice, Mantua, Ferrara,
etc. -- followed the lead of princely Florence. Even Rome -- always
the last to join in a cultural development -- had to adopt the
fashion.

     It was also the great age of art, which had a separate and
earlier development. Architecture and sculpture had reached their
height, and painting was in the first stage of its new evolution.
Independently of any literary influence, laymen had taken over
architecture and sculpture from the monks, and had by their soaring
structures helped to educate Europe in a sense of beauty. This
helped the new feeling for culture, and the revival of the
classical standards reacted on painting and lifted it to its
highest level.

     But it was an historical accident which did most to promote
the classical Renaissance. As I have said, the Greeks were
relenting in their attitude toward the heretics of Rome because
they wanted help against the Turks. The aggression of the Mongols
had driven the Turks from western Asia into Mesopotamia, and they
turned Mohammedan and joined the Arabs. We have here one more
instance of the utter falseness of the Christian plea that no
agency could have civilized the Teutonic tribes in less time -- six
or seven centuries -- than the Church took to civilize them. Like
the Arabs in the days of Mohammed the early Turks were not a whit
higher in culture than the Teutons had been, yet, again like the
Arabs, they were fully civilized within about a century; not by any
religion, but by contact with the older civilization. They steadily
encroached upon the Greek or Byzantine Empire, and in 1543 they
took Constantinople. Then it was, especially, that Greek scholars
swarmed to Italy, with manuscript copies of the old Greek classics
in their trunks.

     One may wonder -- indeed, it is remarkable how few historical
writers do wonder -- why this Greek literature which they brought
to Europe had not proved a greater inspiration to themselves. By
the middle of the fourteenth century, hardly a hundred years since
the first Turks had pitched their rude tents in Mesopotamia, the
Turkish Mohammedan civilization was so superior, not only to the
Latin Christian, but to the Greek Christian, that numbers of Greeks
fled to it and embraced Islam. The Turkish corruption with which we
are more familiar belongs to later centuries of Ottoman history. In
the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the Turkish government or
administration was one of the purest in the world, and art and
letters were brilliantly cultivated; whereas the Greek Empire was,
as I have shown in my "Empresses of Constantinople," corrupt,
degenerate, vicious, and -- in spite of its very conventional art
and decorativeness -- coarse and brutal.

     I do not see how any historian can avoid the conclusion that
the responsibility lies with the creed of the Greeks. It may have
inspired many self-tormenting saints, as it did in Europe, on the
principle that forty years' repression or starvation of their sex-
impulses would be rewarded with an eternity of bliss. I am, I fear,
obtuse to that kind of superiority. It may have insured a safe
passage through the gates of heaven for millions: a matter on which



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I do not care to speculate. But its entire and lamentable failure
to sustain a civilization is as obvious in the east as its failure
to inspire a civilization is in the west. Not the German barbarism,
but the creed imposed upon them, ruined Europe.

     But these works which the Greek refugees brought to Italy, and
helped to make known to Europe, entered a new world. One thinks of
the seed stored in Egyptian tombs for millennia; or one would
recall that fact if it were true that the seed will germinate if we
plant it today. The Greek ideals were not dead. They had but lain
for a thousand years in a living tomb. They were brought to Europe
when the corruption of the Papal Church was at its height, and men
were therefore prepared to consider other standards of life. They
were brought to a race which had for a century or two been pushing,
half consciously, in the direction of the Greek idea of life. That
feeling was really anti-Christian, and we have to see how it was
that no thunders from the Vatican fell upon the ears of the
Humanists, and why so few of them were requested to explain their
philosophy of life to the Inquisition.

                 THE PAPACY AND THE RENAISSANCE

     The Popes, as I said, were living luxuriously, and some of
them immorally, in Avignon when Petrarch began the classical
revival. Read his letters, and you will realize that it was in
large part the spectacle of ignorant Christendom exploited to pay
for the vices and luxuries of the Papal court at Avignon which made
Petrarch turn with affection and regard to the old pagan world
reflected in the classical literature. Petrarch loved when he
listed, not when priests permitted it, yet the sight of Avignon,
near which he then lived, in its Papal days makes him write as if
he were a Marcus Aurelius.

     During the seventy years' absence of the Popes at Avignon,
which was due entirely to bribery and political influence, Rome
sank rapidly in culture and importance. The grass grew on its
streets. We have seen that it had never taken the lead in any
cultural advance, and now the opulent cities of northern Italy
regarded it with disdain. There was a serious danger of Italy
disavowing the Papacy, and with much trouble the Popes were at
length induced to return to Rome. A Neapolitan monk, of fiery
speech, was made Pope, and, when he told the cardinals what he
thought of their morals, they elected an Anti-Pope; and the
cardinals sought the life of the Pope, and the Pope had six of them
lowered into a deep well and almost murdered.

     So the strange spectacle was prolonged from age to age -- the
heart of Christendom sinking lower and lower as the rest of
Christendom rose in civilization -- until at last the whole Church
was outraged to learn, from the great Council of Constance, that
the man who had ruled it for five years under the name of John
XXIII was an ex-brigand of boundless sensuality, entirely destitute
of religious or moral sentiments. Rome was by this time the butt of
popular songsters all over Europe. The best elements in the Church
united in a demand that the Roman masquerade should cease. and the
Church should be governed by Councils.



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     It will thus be understood why up to this stage the Papacy had
taken no interest in the new cultural movement. Three decent Popes
then ruled the Church for a few decades, and the third of them,
Nicholas V, was a man of some cultivation. He opened Rome to the
classical revival. He began the adornment of the city with
beautiful buildings.

     It is now the fashion for Catholic writers to tell how the
Church applauded the Renaissance and sought to direct the zeal for
knowledge without infidelity and for beauty without license. Let us
remind them that it was not until 1450 -- a century or more after
the rest of Europe -- that the Papacy began to show any concern for
letters or art though its wealth was enormous. Let us remind them
also that Rome, with its glorious ancient monuments, was the
natural home for the Renaissance, yet it was not until 1462 that
any Pope forbade builders to strip the marble linings off the old
buildings to make lime and use the precious stones to make the
miserable dwellings of the medieval Romans.

     And, when it is boasted that Pope Nicholas V vied with the
Humanists in a zeal for letters, let us recall that at his death in
1455 his collection consisted of only 1,176 manuscript books,
mostly ecclesiastical literature, and that in 1484 the Vatican
Library, "the most important library in the west in the fifteenth
century" (an apologist in the "Cambridge Modern History" proudly
says), had only about two thousand books. Six centuries earlier the
Moorish ruler in Spain, Al Hakim, had had a library of half a
million books, and hundreds of his subjects, with not one-tenth the
income of the Popes, would have regarded the Papal collection with
disdain.

     Nicholas V made a beginning, and it was quite time. That is
the germ of historical truth in all the glorification of him by
writers on "the Catholic Renaissance." Granted, you may say, but
why cavil about these humble beginnings? Within a hundred years
Rome became the most beautiful city in the world and had the
greatest school of painters, sculptors, and architects in the
world. A long line of Popes used all the resources of the
Renaissance to embellish the center of Christendom.

     I am meeting questions which occur to every thoughtful person
and the answers to which are generally shirked by academic
historians. And the question here is: What relation had this late
artistic splendor in Rome, this patronage of the Renaissance by the
Popes, to the Christian creed? The answer is: None. Of the
inspiration of the artists I will speak later, but about the Papal
patrons of the art there is now no controversy, The most learned
Catholic historian of the Papacy, Dr. Pastor, is in line with all
other historians. The Papal court had passed into a new phase of
degradation, and, the less religious the Popes were, the more they
patronized art.

     Since the cardinals elect the Pope, it is upon these that the
moral health of the Papacy depends, and for two hundred years the
cardinals were, as a body, appallingly corrupt. At every election
they fought, with gold and hired assassins, for the great prize,
since the income of the Papacy was now stupendous, and the


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successful candidate was forced to make new cardinals of totally
unworthy supporters, or chose to make cardinals of equally unworthy
relatives. When the Popes were not corrupt, they were nepotists,
promoting and enriching their relatives irrespective of character.
The result was that during the period of what is called the
Catholic Renaissance the Papal court had a degradation which
differed from that of the tenth century only in being refined and
perfumed and clad in silk. I have given the details in my "Crises
in the History of the Papacy" and "Popes and Their Church," but the
whole of them may be read, or discovered by the diligent inquirer,
in the very extensive Catholic history of Dr. L. Pastor "The
History of the Popes."

     At the death of Nicholas V the rival cardinals fought until
there was a deadlock, and a pious old Spaniard, the first Borgia,
got the prize. His piety, however, was quite consistent with his
rapid promotion of his amorous nephew, Rodrigo Borgia, who at once
began to exploit the venereal opportunities of his high clerical
position. The next Pope, Pius II, was actually a Humanist, but he
did next to nothing for letters. He was gouty and repentant, and he
saw "the gates ajar" in front of him. The next Pope, Paul II, also
was aged and inactive, and the stream of Roman life simply flowed
on.

     Then a Franciscan friar, Sixtus IV, became Pope; and Catholic
writers tell how the patronage of art and letters in Rome took a
more generous turn. They do not tell how Sixtus IV at once promoted
two nephews (some historians say natural sons) of his who were as
unbridled as Rodrigo Borgia. Sixtus IV said his prayers while
Cardinal Pietro Riario, his younger nephew, painted Rome red --
very literally, for his gorgeous palace had five hundred servants
in scarlet silk. His favorite paramour, Tiresia, wore two thousand
dollars' worth of pearls on her slippers. Pietro, a raw provincial
youth until the Holy Ghost descended upon his uncle, spent nearly
a million dollars (worth many times that sum today) and died of
vice and drink, under the shadow of the Vatican, within two years.
The other nephew was sober by comparison. He was piling up his
dollars to buy the Papacy -- it now went to the greatest briber --
and his one luxury was handsome women. His children were not
disguised as nephews or his chief mistress as a secretary. This was
the "great Pope" of the future, Julius II.

     When Sixtus died, Rome was an armed camp. The cardinals had
troops of the medieval equivalent of gunmen, and the bribery was
opulent. But it was again a deadlock, and the tired Holy Ghost
selected Innocent VIII. In the new fashion he at once sent for his
natural son, Franceschetto, and this youth leaned much nearer to
Nero than to Christ. Most of the cardinals kept their pages --
unnatural vice was as common as natural -- and their mistresses in
their luxurious palaces, and their gambling, in which half a
million dollars might be lost in a night, was done in the light of
their own lamps. But the palate for this kind of thing was becoming
jaded in Rome, and the Pope's son wandered about at night, with his
cutthroats, breaking into any house where a pretty maid or wife had
been located.




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     The old Roman families, such as the Colonna and the Orsini,
who regarded the Papacy as their proper heritage, had now to
contend with three new broods: the Borgias, the Riarios, and the
Cibos. All of them left it to a few old-fashioned cardinals to
practice the old-fashioned virtues of chastity and sobriety, and
for their advancement in the Sacred College relied on the new
weapons, steel and gold. More than two hundred murders
distinguished the Papal election of 1492, but Cardinal Borgia
distributed amongst the voting cardinals gifts worth something like
a million dollars and became the Holy Father. Rome gasped, and
smiled.

     We are now permitted to believe that there were "a few" bad
Popes and a few others who had been "irregular" in their youth, but
we are asked to admire how rarely Popes were immoral during their
tenure of office. Is the world losing its sense of humor? This
modern apologetic makes one wonder. In the first place, cardinals
are not usually chosen to be Popes unless they are well advanced in
years, and, on careful inquiry, these new apologists will learn
that men advanced in years are, curiously, not so ardent in love as
they had once been. In the next place, however, the Papal record
is, in view of this highly moral arrangement, to say nothing of the
light of the Holy Ghost and the very special interest of Christ in
his Church, quite picturesque. We really know nothing about the
youth of the great majority of the Popes of the Middle Ages, but of
those whose actions have been chronicled between 900 A.D. and 1500
A.D. twelve of the Popes were immoral (five of them in an unnatural
way) during their term of office, and as many more had merely
outburned their vices. For a series of generally old men, presiding
over one of the most ascetic of creeds, it is certainly a gay
calendar.

     Alexander VI is by no means the worst of the Popes. Several
Popes of the tenth century, as well as Boniface VIII and John
XXIII, were much worse. But we happen to know him well, and even
Catholic historians like Dr. Pastor now reproduce the birth
certificates of his six children.

     In a sort of historical romance, "The Pope's Favorite," I have
given a detailed picture of Rome and the Vatican in the days of
Alexander and his latest mistress, a beautiful girl of fifteen when
he first seduced her. The element of fiction in that book is light.
It is simply history clothed with flesh; and it is safe to say that
no professedly religious establishment that the world has ever seen
could compare for a moment with the Vatican Palace at that time.
Alexander's philandering was all conducted in the "Sacred Palace."
Not content with his lovely young mistress, and although he was
nearing seventy years old, be had other women brought to him. In
1496, four years after his election, the sixty-seventh year of his
age, the Pope begot a son; and in the same year a severed head was
found on a pole in Rome with the inscription: "This is the head of
my father-in-law, who prostituted his daughter to the Pope." His
favorite and dissolute son Juan was murdered, most probably by his
brother Cesare, in the following year, yet as late as 1501, less
than two years before his death, the veteran sensualist had orgies
in the Vatican of so exotic a nature that my British publisher
compelled me to curtail the description of one of them which I took


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from the highest possible authority, the Master of Ceremonies of
the Vatican. The Pope and his son and daughter had fifty of the
most beautiful prostitutes of Rome dancing naked before them. And
the priest who wrote this down in the Vatican at the time concludes
with the amazing statement that the Pope distributed prizes to
those of his male servants who could demonstrate the greatest
virility. I have read many descriptions of orgies, in many tongues,
but his in the "Sacred Palace" is the most picturesque.

     So the Popes did not discourage the Renaissance. That is the
serious point of my again writing on these matters. Rome and the
Vatican were drenched with what the Christian ethic calls
corruption. Alexander's rival, Julius II, had to wait so long for
the Papacy, that the days of his natural and unnatural vices were
over. He was quite a proper Pope, a very great patron of art; but
he swore like a stevedore, and his passions were only less elegant
than the amorous excesses of his cardinal-cousin. Leo X followed
him, and fully sustained the princely patronage of art; and he had
the most grossly indecent comedies enacted in the Vatican; he is
said by the contemporary historian Guicciardini to have been, as
Pope, "excessively devoted to pleasures which cannot be called
decent" (he means unnatural vice), and was quite clearly devoid of
any moral sentiment and most probably of religious sentiment or
beliefs. Paul III closes the period of the Catholic Renaissance;
and he had been made a cardinal because his sister was Alexander's
mistress, and had had four children born in his palace.

     Need one say more? You can read all this in Pastor, the
Catholic historian. The poor man imagined that, when Leo X threw
open the Secret Archives of the Vatican (after abstracting the
compromising documents), and urged Catholic writers to "tell the
truth," the Pope meant what he said. So he wrote a fairly (not
entirely) candid history of the Popes of the Renaissance; and his
Church has kept him in sackcloth and ashes, so to say, ever since.
The whole story is, however, now well known. Rome was as
conspicuous for "free love" during the Catholic Renaissance as
Corinth or Antioch or Alexandria had ever been.

     But to complete the story we must glance at the sources of the
wealth with which the Popes built St. Peter's, decorated the
Vatican, and drew great artists from all sides to form a Roman
School.

     Here again there is no dispute. It was tainted money, if there
ever was tainted money. The simony of Rome, the sale of sacred
offices, shocked Christendom even more than its vices. For two
hundred years the system had grown of selling a clerical office
with income before the holder died -- selling it to various people,
with "expectations" and "preferences" -- and charging fees for
every grace and permit that Rome had to issue. John XXII at the
beginning of the fourteenth century so organized and enlarged this
traffic as to secure an acknowledged income of about a million
dollars a year: and the brother of his banker tells us that he left
sixty million dollars in gold and jewels, the far greater part of
which never passed through his ledgers. We must not forget,
moreover, that a dollar would then purchase many times as much as
it now does.


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     But Pope after Pope extended the sordid traffic and discovered
that "indulgences" could be gained just as easily by those who
remained at home and paid to the Church the price of a journey to
Rome as by those who made the actual pilgrimage; and since one was
robbed all the way across Europe, and even in St. Peter's, to say
nothing of the loss of time and business, the easier way proved
popular. It was like the discovery of the Californian gold-fields.
The Popes sent agents out over Europe, and, unfurling the Papal
banner in the churches, they shouted their wares with all the
oratory of street-salesmen, and the gold flowed in streams to Rome.
It is estimated that Leo X, who is generally named by Catholics as
the greatest patron of the Renaissance, spent about two million
dollars (ancient value) a year, and left enormous debts at his
death. Nor was it, in his case, mere zeal for the prestige of Rome
that cost so much. "The splendor of the Leonine Age," says Dr.
Pastor, "so often and so much belauded, is in many respects more
apparent than real." He spent prodigious sums on luxuries for the
Vatican palace, but neglected the Roman University, slighted
Michelangelo, and did relatively little for sculpture and
architecture. His tastes were in many respects gross, and his rooms
and gardens stank with what his Church calls indecency.

     St. Peter's, the Sistine Chapel, and the other memorials of
the Catholic Renaissance are monuments of the corruption of the
Papacy. For a season the great art of the Renaissance found a
superb opportunity in Rome, precisely because the spirit of Christ
was utterly forgotten in it for a season. Of the eight "Holy
Fathers" who ruled the Church during that season, from 1484 to
1549, five were fathers in the carnal sense, and the other three
reigned only twelve years collectively. All the time the atmosphere
of the clerical world was one of extravagant luxury and every kind
of vice, and the funds for it all were derived in ways in
comparison with which the ways of the money-changers whom Jesus is
said to have driven from the Temple were as innocent as the games
of children.

                     THE SPIRIT OF HUMANISM

     The leading scholars of the Renaissance are generally
described as the Humanists, and the latter word is, like the
former, open to more than one interpretation. The poet Chaucer is
often hailed by literary men as the first Humanist, though his
Humanism had no relation to classical literature; and the
philosopher William of Occam is hailed by philosophical writers as
the first Humanist, though his work in turn was unaffected by Greek
or Roman literature. In our own day a new meaning has been read
into the word.

     It is, in any case, an awkward term. Properly speaking, it
ought to mean a concern about human affairs rather than divine. The
Agnostic is the only real Humanist, and ours is the dawning age of
Humanism, the inauguration of the kingdom of Man instead of the
passing kingdom of God.

     But the persistence with which the word has clung to the
scholars of the Renaissance brings out a very important truth. Few
of them rejected belief in God, but as a body they rejected the


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tyranny over life and culture exercised by the clergy in the name
of God. They brought the world nearer to Humanism. Painters and
sculptors demanded the use of living human models instead of the
lifeless conventional figures which had hitherto been copied.
Literary men demanded that they should be allowed to tell stories
and write poems or songs about common human life -- be as free to
describe a sin as the painter was to describe a limb -- and not
confine the pen to chronicles and hymns and lives of saints.
Teachers insisted on the value of instruction about man and nature
as well as about God. Philosophers determined to speculate freely
about man and nature apart from revelation. The Renaissance was, as
Michelet said, "the discovery of the world and of man," but man was
the more important of the two. Humanism is a note rather than a
creed in the Renaissance,

     But the note is skeptical and it is significant in world-
history. It was a rebellion against the genuine teaching of the
Christian creed. The interest, the inspiration, the high
potentialities of man had been obscured by the miserable philosophy
of human nature which priests imposed in the name of the Bible. If
the race lay under a primitive curse, if all men had died in Adam,
as Paul said, Paul's attitude to human nature was correct. If Jesus
was right that to look with desire at a beautiful woman was to be
punished for all eternity, and that wealth was a very serious
handicap to one's hopes of heaven, the moral was clear.

     Yet somehow, in the course of that long awakening that I have
described, human nature was vindicating its worth in spite of the
creed. Men felt that they had the high powers which priests denied.
Unconsecrated men wrested in succession from the hands of priests
and monks the arts and crafts of building, carving, painting,
governing, making laws, teaching, thinking, writing, etc., and each
rose to a much higher level. In a glorious burst of confidence,
strengthened by the example of the Mohammedans, they tried their
creativeness, and they found it as great in art as in industry. And
the discovery of beauty, in woman or in nature, brought its usual
sequel: the assertion of the right to love and to enjoy. It was the
beginning of naturalism as a deliberate creed, and the beginning of
the end of supernaturalism.

     It is easy to see how the classical revival, which supervened
upon this development, stimulated it. It was the human form that
had inspired the world's greatest artists. It was in an age when
men were proud of their human nature, and had no theology which
overshadowed it, that man wrought his finest achievements. It was
a little nation with the least tyrannical and most superficial of
religions (as far as the men who did things were concerned) which
gave us the finest philosophies, finest sculpture and architecture,
finest tragedies, and finest ideals of corporate and individual
life. Pride in human power is the real Humanism of the Renaissance.

     It is usual to contrast Humanism and Scholasticism, the system
of theological thought elaborated in the medieval schools which
became the universities of Europe. As I have occasionally pointed
out, some modern writers, partly to make a parade of liberality,
partly to say something new, partly in a consciousness that a sixth
of the reading public in America is Catholic, borrow phrases from


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Catholic writers. Scholasticism had been calumniated, they say; it
was not a barren system of thought, discussing such things as how
many angels can stand on the point of a needle. Let them try to
read the Scholastics, as they have obviously not done. When I was
a Catholic professor, I found that even my colleagues never read
them. There is no living thought in them.

     But Scholasticism is interesting on one side. Large numbers of
French students went to work amongst the Moors in Spain, and it was
impossible for men like Thomas Aquinas to ignore that a very high
civilization smiled at his verbose deductions from Scripture and
the Fathers. These Moorish philosophers, he found, swore by
Aristotle; and just at that time Greek copies of Aristotle's works
reached Paris. The Crusaders had gone out to meet the Saracens once
more, and they had this time preferred the easier and more
profitable task of taking and sacking Christian Constantinople
(1204 A.D.). They brought home manuscript copies of Aristotle
amongst their loot, and these were translated into Latin. Aristotle
was henceforward used to give some substance to the frothy verbiage
of the Schoolmen. Some (Roger Bacon, etc.) tried even to develop
the germs of science buried in Aristotle's works, but the Church
smelt sulphur at once and stamped out the danger.

     The philosophical works brought to Italy in the fifteenth
century were chiefly those of Plato and the Neo-Platonists. I
cannot discuss here the contrast between Plato and Aristotle. One
illustration must suffice. Plato used all his art of rhetoric and
reasoning to prove the personal immortality of the soul, and
Aristotle rejected the belief. So, as the Humanists followed Plato,
there was a very decided hostility to the professional or clerical
teachers of theology and philosophy. The main point was, however,
that Plato was used as a cover for free speculation, while the
teachers in the universities were hidebound. The Church, naturally,
watched this side of the Renaissance, and some, like Pomponazzi,
were driven to say that a thing could be false in the light of
reason and true in the light of religion.

     Philosophy is, however, a subject too large for the limits of
my space and, to say the truth, too small for my inclination. Let
us pass to the other extreme and consider what influence the new
spirit had on art.

     Until well on in the fifteenth century the classical revival
affected a relatively small number of people, whereas medieval art
was then far advanced. Painting, however, lingered behind sculpture
and architecture. It began its higher development, in Giotto,
independently of classic literature, by the sheer artistic impulse
to reproduce beauty as it actually was, in man and nature. Yet it
had not reached its great days when the classical ideals began to
be diffused in Italy, and the influence of the new spirit is then
plain to the eye.

     It will suffice here to consider for a moment the two supreme
artists of the Roman school, if not of all Christendom,
Michelangelo and Raphael. I have described the skeptical and
sensual atmosphere in which they worked, but one is constantly
confronted with the claim that, as they were "profoundly religious"


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men, they found their mighty inspiration in their own piety in
spite of the scurrilities of Popes and cardinals. I would not here
express a personal opinion, and I have earlier quoted Symonds and
various authorities on art. But it is interesting to see how
Professor W.H. Hudson, who had a weight of authority behind his
words, deals with these artists in his particularly valuable
chapter on the art of the Renaissance.

     He quotes the often-quoted saying of Michelangelo, that the
painter of religious pictures must, if he is to succeed, be a good
man, or "even a saint." The Catholic (forgetting the paintings of
Pinturicchio, a very wicked man, or of Rubens, a very fleshly man)
generally ends there. But Professor Hudson goes on to say that "no
man did more than he [Michelangelo] to destroy the religious
meaning of traditional Christian art." The great artist, he says,
contributed mightily to the "secularization" of painting,
sculpture, and architecture. He says in one of his sonnets that the
highest manifestation of God is in "human forms sublime." And of
his wonderful painting of the Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel,
to which the enthusiast will turn most eagerly for proof of
religious inspiration, Professor Hudson observes that it is
"difficult to detect the play of any distinctively Christian
feeling," that "the last link connecting art with Christian
tradition has been broken," and that "to regard it as a Christian
interpretation of a Christian theme is absurd," ("Story of the
Renaissance," pp. 205-6).

     Raphael, on the other hand, he says, sometimes shows religious
inspiration, but "more often be simply paints the most beautiful
woman he can find as the representative of motherhood, without
indicating, either by symbolism or by general tone and expression,
the transcendental significance of his type" (p. 203). Murillo in
his best work does the same, and it is the general truth about the
Renaissance painters. Like Rubens, who loved to paint the luscious
nude body of his mistress as Venus -- there are three known copies
of his "Venus and Adonis" -- they painted figures from the ancient
mythology and allegory just as beautifully as they represented the
Madonna and the Bambino. Titian, the last great Italian painter,
was a pure Humanist. Rembrandt shows art fully secularized. Darer
and Holbein seem to the expert to reflect the influence of
Protestantism. In any case, the broad historical fact is that once
Rome was purified of its paganism and sensuality, all great art
ceased in it. Let the admirer of the Catholic Renaissance digest
that.

     In literature the spirit of Humanism did not wait for the
classical revival, but it received a remarkable invigoration in the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Chaucer is decidedly a Humanist,
and the entire body of troubadours and song and ballad makers of
earlier centuries represents a determination to secularize music
and poetry. By the fifteenth century many of these popular songs
actually satirized the vices of the clergy and the greed of the
Vatican. Then came the new learning, and Italy soon had its
Petrarch, Boccaccio, Ariosto, Tasso, Cellini, Machiavelli, etc.



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     A very distinctive effect of the classical Renaissance, and
more particularly of the Catholic Renaissance, if we were to take
that phrase seriously, was the revival of indecent comedy. The
comedies of Plautus and Terentius are now cited by the apologists
as one of the symptoms of the low moral tone of the pagan world,
but he would be astonished if he took the trouble to ascertain how
fond the Popes were of seeing them acted in the Vatican. In point
of fact, they are much less gross than they are represented to be
by the people who do not read them. I have a complete edition of
the Latin Comedies of Plautus, and have read them all. The least
delicate is the "Menaechmi," and it was performed in the Vatican
Palace before the end of the fifteenth century, and often repeated.

     Such comedies proved so popular that a large number of
imitations of them were composed, and Pope Leo X was one of their
most ardent patrons. His intimate friend Cardinal Bibbiena (who had
his bathroom frescoed as the bedroom walls of houses of love in
Paris today) wrote some of the most lascivious, and Cardinal Cibo
took leading parts in them. Ariosto, Michiavelli, and others
contributed to this kind of literature, and it went all over
Europe. Shakespeare's "Comedy of Errors" is directly inspired by
the "Menaechmi" of Plautus.

     Here the Renaissance found a material implement of an
importance that cannot be exaggerated: the printed book. Artless
pictures of the monks of the Middle Ages copying and preserving the
classics for us no longer move us when we know that Moorish rulers
had libraries of half a million manuscript volumes, and when we
read what infinite trouble the Humanists of Christendom had to get
the classics together in the fifteenth century. Yet it was a
revolutionary advance in the education of the world when paper and
printing came into use. I am a quick writer, yet find eight
thousand words -- not of original composition, but of copying or
translating -- a day, too severe a task to contemplate daily. A
monk would take a lifetime to make, at the rate of one per week, a
thousand copies of this one chapter. A machine can produce them at
the rate of five thousand or more an hour.

     Paper had been introduced from China by the Mohammedans, and
Christendom very slowly and reluctantly borrowed it from the Moors.
Printing also should be traced back along the same route, for the
Chinese had for ages been accustomed to block printing. In the
middle of the fifteenth century, the turning point of the
Renaissance, this led to the invention of printing by separate
letter blocks, and before the end of the century there were twenty
two master printers in Cologne and a number in each of the German
cities. By 1465 there was a press in Italy, five years later one in
France, and in 1476 the Caxton Press was established in England.

     Although printing was at first necessarily very slow, there
can be no doubt that the multiplication and cheapening of books
would soon have led to an extension of culture to the more
thoughtful workers if the normal course of events had not been
broken by the Reformation. The works of Erasmus, in particular,
were read far beyond the circle of the cultivated few. In the main,
however, as we should expect at so early a date, the efforts of the
Humanists were directed to the improvement of such education as


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               THE STORY OF RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY

already existed. Vittorino da Feltre and Guarino in Italy, Johannes
von Sturm and W. Ratke in Germany, Comenius in Moravia, Roger
Ascham in England, opened model schools, and forced the
introduction of the "humanities" into education. Rabelais has many
ideas for the reform of education in his extraordinary work, and
Montaigne gave currency to them in a more respectable medium.

     The effect of Humanism upon the study of science, which was at
once seen in the work of Francis Bacon, is too important to be
discussed in a few lines. We must, however, note here that the
critical spirit, which is the essence of science and of all
discovery of truth, was at once aroused by the classical
Renaissance. The Italian critic Lorenzo Valla, in fact, better
deserves a place in the memory of our age than most of the monarchs
and Popes of the Middle Ages. A fierce critic of Scholasticism, an
avowed follower of Epicurus, he was the first man in Christendom to
examine fearlessly the bases of the Papal power and expose the
forgeries. In 1440 he published a short study of the supposed
Donation of Constantine which opened the eyes of many to the real
character of the Papacy, and he was the first to apply criticism to
the New Testament. Naturally, the Inquisition sought to make his
acquaintance, and he earned the protection of the Popes by abjuring
his wicked habit of telling the truth and devoting his genius to
such innocent subjects as "Elegancies of the Latin Tongue." A
century later the power of the Vatican was shattered over half of
Europe, and a complete edition of Valla's works helped to lay the
foundation of modern critical history.

                 ERASMUS AND THE OTHER HUMANISTS

     Geographical circumstances account for the original
development of civilization, not in what we call the Great White
Race, but in Crete, Egypt, and Mesopotamia. The same geographical
circumstances explain the Rebirth of civilization in Italy, as we
have already explained. Germany had had its hour of hope under
Charlemagne, and its period of achievement when it developed the
Romanesque architecture. France had had a promising civilization,
inspired by the Moors, in its southern provinces, had taken the
lead in the revival of schools, and had given the world the Gothic
architecture. But religious reaction and political vicissitudes had
brought these efforts to an end, and it was the breathing of the
spirit of the old world, through Moors and Byzantines, upon the
nearest country, Italy, that effected the real and lasting
awakening.

     From Italy "the new learning" naturally passed at once to
France, and as early as 1458 Greeks were teaching Greek in Paris
University. The French, like the Spaniards and Rumanians, flatter
themselves that they are a Latin nation -- strange how persistently
Christian nations have claimed affinity with the wicked old pagan
civilization -- and they had a temperamental inclination to a
classical revival. In the south, moreover, they had, like Italy,
beautiful and impressive remains of Roman days. In point of
historical fact, the Renaissance did not at once conquer France.
Until the French invaded southern Italy in 1494 there was little
effect of the revival except a group of students of Greek
literature.


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               THE STORY OF RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY

     After 1500 the new spirit gained ground. From the court
downward manners were refined, and from the university downward
education was reformed. Men of great and real learning like
Scaliger and Casaubon arose; Rabelais put his remarkable erudition
and his skeptical and stimulating ideas in a form which appealed to
the lingering grossness of Christian taste; and at length Montaigne
(1532-92) formulated the new spirit with an elegance and sobriety
of taste which commended it to all who could read. The great age of
Richelieu and the Academy, of Moliere (a complete skeptic), Racine,
and Corneille soon followed, and prepared the way for Voltaire and
Rousseau.

     But Paris rendered one early service for which it thought
nothing at the time, It taught Erasmus Greek. Erasmus, the man who
"laid the egg which Luther hatched," did more than any other single
Humanist to spread and deepen the influence of the Renaissance. A
traveler in Spain in 1527 found in almost every country inn in that
reactionary land a translation of the "Encheiridion" (or moral
treatise) of Erasmus. Another and bolder work of his, the
"Colloquia," was brought under the grave consideration of the
Sorbonne at Paris, and it was expected that it would be condemned.
A Paris printer hastily brought out and distributed an edition of
twenty-four thousand copies of it; and this, even in our time, is
a larger circulation than a serious work of any price could hope to
attain. It is a measure of what the modern world owes to Erasmus,
and should be carefully considered by those who, not living in the
days of the Inquisition, lightly blame him for not joining the
Reformers or even heading a pronounced Rationalist movement. His
works were eagerly read all over Europe, and had a remarkable
influence in spreading the critical and humanitarian spirit.

     Desiderius Erasmus was a Dutchman, born in Rotterdam in 1467,
the illegitimate son of a doctor's daughter. Gheraerd was his
father's name, which he Latinized as Erasmus. He became a monk, for
the convenience of his guardians, and had a wicked eye on monks
ever afterwards. "They are called fathers," he says of the friars,
"and they often are." He became a priest and went to study theology
and Greek at Paris and in Italy. His wit and brilliant talent
opened every door to him, but he migrated to England, where he gave
powerful assistance to the little group of Humanists, and pointed
the true moral of the new learning by publishing his "Encomium
Moriae" (Praise of Folly), a mirror of the folly of Christendom in
tolerating such priests and Popes as it had. For the last twenty
years of his life he lived in southern Germany, where his works did
much to prepare the way for the Reformation.

     Known in four countries, indeed in the whole of civilized
Europe, as the most brilliant man of his time, Erasmus had a
thousand readers for the reader of any other serious writer of the
seventeenth century. And he did not hesitate to season his work
with, not only his pungent wit, but passages which show how
entirely free his mind was. His most effective work was his
"Colloquia" (Conversations), a familiar and mirthful indictment of
the religious comedy of Christendom. It is, says a recent writer,
"a masterpiece," but "disfigured by lewd and unchaste passages."
That was why Christians read it in the tens of thousands, and had
their eyes opened. It was condemned by the Sorbonne, and burned in


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               THE STORY OF RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY

Spain, not for its "lewdness," but for its scorching exposure of
religion. Erasmus knew that the world was not ripe for a powerful
movement on the lines of his own intimate ideas, and be remained a
nominal Christian, stimulating people to think by attacking plain
abuses. He refused, when pressed, to join Luther precisely because
he did not believe the Christianity of Luther any more than the
Christianity of Thomas Aquinas. He did a mighty work for modernism,
and that is enough for us.

     In Germany the work of the Renaissance was brief because it
was soon lost in the roar and chaos of the Reformation. Erasmus was
not the first to teach Greek and translate Greek books there.
Johann Maller and Rudolph Agricola had been to Italy to study Greek
early in the sixteenth century, and they prepared the way for
Erasmus in Germany. Johann Reuchlin, the first great German
Humanist, studied Greek at Paris and in Italy, and he revived the
study of Hebrew (hitherto almost confined to the rabbis) which
would in time, in a freer age, inspire the beginning of biblical
criticism. Reuchlin was summoned before the Inquisition at Cologne,
a dense center of reaction, and although a representative of the
Pope saved him, the friars persevered and induced Rome later to
condemn him. He inspired Melanchthon and worked with Ulrich von
Hutten. But there was formidable opposition in Germany to the
Renaissance.

     In England the service of the classical Renaissance in guiding
and confirming a native development, or broader Renaissance, is
particularly clear. Early in the days of Humanism a few English
scholars had gone to Italy to study Greek. They were "monks of
Canterbury," and on their return they taught at Canterbury. The
news slowly spread, and Oxford University, and later Cambridge
University, started chairs of Greek. Erasmus went to England first
in 1498, and he taught there from 1510 to 1513. He does not say so,
but the heavy piety of the English Hellenists -- one hesitates to
call them Humanists -- cannot have been entirely to his taste. It
was a church group. Grocyn was a conservative Doctor of Divinity.
Colet was Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral and an early Protestant in
his zeal for pure and primitive Christianity. Linacre was a royal
physician, but ended his days as a priest. Sir Thomas More, the wit
and scholar and Utopianist, was the only real Humanist; and he must
have astonished, if not pained, Erasmus by eventually suffering the
removal of his head for the Catholic faith.

     Even in the sixteenth century, says Sir Richard Jebb, "Britain
produced no scholar of the first rank," and "the British press sent
forth few books which advanced Greek or Latin learning." A painful
confession for an academic Englishman, but, as all the world knows,
England produced something of infinitely greater value than
commentaries on Tacitus or new editions of Ovid. It not only
reformed education in the classical sense, and produced some great
early educators, but it gave birth to Shakespeare and the
Elizabethan drama, to Francis Bacon and the new zeal for science,
to a literature which would not shrink, as the Italian did, but
remain fertile in great productions down to the nineteenth century.
It adopted the classic model in architecture, started a new school
of painting, joined with great effect in the conquest of the seas,
brought about a general refinement of manners (compared with the
Middle Ages), and founded "the Mother of Parliaments."

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               THE STORY OF RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY

     That in all this we have to see the quickening of a native
development by putting into it the ferment of the classical spirit
needs no proof. Shakespeare teems with evidence. Even his early
comedies are inspired by Plautus and the Italian imitators of
Plautus, his tragedies often turn to pagan themes, and his language
is one of the most singular mixtures of exquisite imagery in pure
English and long Latin words which many of his hearers can hardly
have understood. Francis Bacon is heavily indebted to early Greek
science. Thomas More is equally indebted to Plato.

     The political and economic conditions were at the time
favoring a revival of civilization in England, but the effect of
the Renaissance, in the narrower sense, is obvious. Men caught its
spirit even when they ignored its scholarship. The standard of
conduct remained gross, both before and after the Reformation. The
life of the mass of the people -- "the clowns," in Shakespearean
language was so coarse and stupid that we can hardly imagine it.
The idea that Elizabethan days had more sexual license than earlier
days can only occur to people who do not know the Middle Ages. But
this freedom, as I said in speaking of Christendom generally,
became more deliberate and respectable. It was not a sneaking
infringement of a divine law. Man had a sense of mastery. Life and
love were his possessions. The soft touch of silk, the perfume of
flowers, the thrill of happy music and dancing, the flash of gold
and jewels, were good things; and if they did quicken the pulse,
well ... Men were not yet quite clear how they stood with the
Almighty in such matters, but they were vaguely asserting that
human right to all knowledge, power, and pleasure, which our age is
at length formulating in incontrovertible terms.


                          ****     ****


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