Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 17.djvu/34

BEMY. 20 RENAISSANCE. of Clovis, who was baptized hy Itcin.v on Di-cem- bt-r 24, 4n(). Ki'iuy lived to sue Uaul almost entirely Christianized, and died in 532 or 533. Some of his letters are ])resered in Mifjne, I'ti- Uologin Laiimi. Ixv., as also two doeumcnts under the title of TcnUimetita, the •jjemiinencss of wliieli has been dispiUed. Consult his Jjife. by Aubert (Paris. IS-l'.l). (2) An .rcliliishop of Lyons (853-875), who sided Wth Cottsclialk (q.v.) and whose works are in Mij>ne. l'<ilroln<i'ui Liilina, cxxi. (3) A IJencdictine monk, head of the epi.seopal school at Khoinis (882-008), whose works, whieli are commentaries and an allef^orical interpretation of the mass, are in Jligne. I'utrolo- gia Ijdiina, exxxi. RENAISSANCE (Fr., new Idrth), or Re- vival OF I.EAUXi.Mi. A name usually applied to the transition from niediieval to modern methods of study and thou;,'ht. As to its origin and the time at which this is to be set. literature is full of misinformation. The most common error, still repeated in textbooks, is that through the capture of Constantinople by tlie Turks in 1453 Oreck manuseri])ts and (ircek schola.rs were brought into Europe in such luimbers that a complete revolution in the intellectual life was thereby and at once produced. Tliis notion takes no account of the condition of European cul- ture which must have existed to make such a reception possible. In fact, the revival of in- terest in learning for its own sake followed a long and natural process. It is clearly discern- il)le mine than a century bcfiu'c tlie capture of Constantinople, and by that time had completely established itself in Italy and made great prog- ress in other countries. The actual importation of manuscripts and teachers, doubtless stinui- lated by this event, had long been going on, and it had alread_y become an established custom for Western youths to seek in Athens or in Con- stantinople satisfaction for the intellectual cu- riosity aroused liy their studies at home. It is again a popular error to suppose that we can reach a clear understanding of the great transition b_v undervaluing the culture of the Jliddle .ges. The difference is not merely or primarily in the mental power of individuals nor in the volume or range of their learning. It is in the spirit in which the3' approached the study of the past and applied it to the condi- tions of the present. Jlediaival learning had been piirsued almost entirely by clergjuien and had been valued chiefly for its service in making clear to the increasing mental acuteness of the West the mysteries of the faith. During this period the European mind had lain under the spell of the philosophy of Realism, with its inevitable indifference to the phenomena of every- day experience and its contempt for the idea of the individual as compared with the authority of traditional institutions. With the beginning of the fourteenth century a reaction makes itself clearly felt. A new philosophy, that of Xominalism. finds expression in the Englishman William of Ockham and becomes a vital force in the political theories of Marsiglio of Padua and his school. The essence of this new way of looking at things is the importance of the individual, and hence his right to think and organize as may seem best to him. In religious affairs we see the applica- tion of this principle in the fearless criticism of the prevailing conditions by Wiclif in Eng- land, lluss in Bohemia, and all their sympathiz- ers, organized or not, throughout Europe. This central idea is that the most important fact of Christianity is the membership of the individual Christian in a eomnuniity of which Christ alone is the head, and that consequently all organized forms of human authority in religion are non- essential and may be totally wrong. The only necessary authority is that of Scripture, and the inevitable result of this is the right of indi- vidual interpretation with all its consequences. From Wiclif on through the whole period of the Reformation, the Bible is the common source of ap])eal for the most diverse forms of opposition to the Roman system. Naturally men found in its infinite variety a thousand serviceable things that were not there. Precisely parallel with this development in religion is the intellectual process we call the Revival of Learning. Wiclif's Italian contem- porary Petrarca subjected to a sweeping criti- cism all the existing forms of the science of his day: the scholastic philosophy, the science of astrology, the study of the law and of medicine, the practice of teaching, all seemed to him to be governed by a set of conventional rules hav- ing no foundation in fact. To this mass of tradition Petrarca opposed the principle of in- dividual study and observation of things as they were. Yet, he, too, like the religious reformers, must have his authority, and he found it in the classic literature. The 'ancients' stood to him for types of a higher manhood, with larger, freer, and truer conceptions of life. They seemed to him free from the superstitious slavery to tradi- tions which he saw around him. His own strug- gling individualism found its justification in what he imagined to be the perfected individual- ism of the ancient world. His own poetic gift found its chief satisfaction in the poetic charm of ancient literature; even the prose of Cicero seemed to him to have a wonderful rhythm long before he could understand it. Then, pre- cisely as the religious reformers insisted that the Bible should be studied without restraint of doctrine or tradition, so 'Petrarca found his chief mission in collecting, collating, copying, and publishing the texts of the classical authors. Still further, as the translations of Wiclif and otheis were made, not from the original tongues, but from the imperfect Latin authorized version (Vulgate), so Petrarca had to be content with Latin versions of the Greek authors. In both cases the authority they reverenced came to men in an imperfect form, but in both the spirit of a new time is perfectly evident. Wiclif is the first apostle of the Protestant Reformation, and Petrarca is the first great teacher of the Revival of Learning. To conclude, the Humanist was as much inclined to discover non-existent things in his classics as was ever the Reformer in his Bible. Petrarca was at once the defender of rational thought, and, after Dante, the chief creator of the modern Italian language. The literary use of the modern tongues, the natural utterance of the free layman, is, equally with the more .sympathetic study of the ancient world, an element in the great reaction against a purely clerical and Latinized culture. This double intellectiial life of Petrarca is shared by all his humanistic contemporaries and