St. Francis's "Hymn to the Sun" had not long been written, and the Franciscans were kneeling in intimate prayer before Mary and spreading her cult afar, when the Dominicans armed themselves for battle with the Devil by setting up the Inquisition. Heavenly love found its focus in the Mary-image, and eo ipso earthly love became akin to the Devil. Woman is Sin — so the great ascetics felt, as their fellows of the Classical, of China, and of India had felt. The Devil rules only through woman. The witch is the propagator of deadly sin. It was Thomas Aquinas who evolved the repulsive theory of Incubus and Succuba. Inward mystics like Bonaventura, Albertus Magnus, Duns Scotus, developed a full metaphysic of the devilish.
The Renaissance had ever the strong faith of the Gothic at the back of its world-outlook. When Vasari eulogized Cimabue and Giotto for returning to Nature as their teacher, it was this Gothic nature that he had in mind, a nature influenced in every nook by the encircling troops of angels and devils that stood there, ever threatening, in the light. "Imitation" of Nature meant imitation of its soul, not of its surface. Let us be rid at last of the fable of a renewal of Classical "Antiquity." Renaissance, Rinascita, meant then the Gothic uplift from A.D. 1000 onward,[1] the new Faustian world-feeling, the new personal experience of the Ego in the Infinite. For some individual spirits, no doubt, it meant a sentimental enthusiasm for the Classical (or what was thought to be the Classical), but that was a manifestation of taste, nothing more.[2] The Classical myth was entertainment-material, an allegorical play, through the thin veil of which men saw, no less definitely than before, the old Gothic actuality. When Savonarola stood up, the antique trappings vanished from the surface of Florentine life in an instant. It was all for the church that the Florentines laboured, and with conviction. Raphael was the most deeply intimate of all Madonna-painters. A firm belief in the realm of Satan, and in deliverance from it through the saints, lay at the root of all this art and literature; and every one of them, painters, architects, and humanists — however often the names of Cicero and Virgil, Venus and Apollo were on their lips — looked upon the burning of witches as something entirely natural and wore amulets against the devil. The writings of Marsilius Ficinus are full of learned disquisitions on devils and witches. Francesco della Mirandola wrote (in elegant Latin) his dialogue "The Witch" in order to warn the fine intellects of his circle against a danger.[3] When Leonardo da Vinci, at the summit of the Renaissance,
- ↑ This is the real conclusion that emerges from Burdach's Reformation, Renaissance, Humanismus (1918).
- ↑ In this connexion, it is important to observe that the education-movement of Humanism took into its field modern Italian, Hebrew, etc., as well as the Classical knowledge. A Dante professorship was founded in Florence in 1373. As for the Classical itself, side by side with all the enthusiasm we find a significant note in Boccaccio, who thanks Jesus Christ for a victory over unbelief that has delivered up the enemy's camp to the victor's enjoyment. Burkhardt, Renaissance, Vol. I, p. 262. (Reclam edition). — Tr.
- ↑ Bezold, Hist. Zeitschr., 45, p. 208.
