In this article the Renaissance will be considered as implying
a comprehensive movement of the European intellect and will
Method toward self-emancipation, toward reassertion of the
natural rights of the reason and the senses, toward
the conquest of this planet as a place of human occupation,
and toward the formation of regulative theoriesMethod of treatment.
both for states and individuals differing from those of medieval
times. The Revival of Learning will be treated as a decisive
factor in this process of evolution on a new plan. To exclude
the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation wholly from the
survey is impossible. These terms indicate moments in the
whole process of modern history which were opposed, each to
the other, and both to the Renaissance; and it is needful to
bear in mind that they have, scientifically speaking, a quite
separate existence. Yet if the history of Europe in the 16th
century of our era came to be written with the brevity with
which we write the history of Europe in the 6th century B.C.,
it would be difficult at the distance of time implied by that
supposition to distinguish the Italian movement of the
Renaissance in its origin from the German movement of the
Reformation. Both would be seen to have a common starting point
in the reaction against long dominant ideas which were
becoming obsolete, and also in the excitation of faculties which
had during the same period been accumulating energy.
The Renaissance, if we try to regard it as a period, was essentially the transition from one historical stage to another. It cannot therefore be confined within strict chronological limits. There is one date, however, which may be remembered with advantage as the starting-point in time of theChronological limits. Renaissance, after the departure from the middle ages had been definitely and consciously made by the Italians. This is the year 1453, when Constantinople, chosen for his capital by the first Christian emperor of Rome, fell into the hands of the Turk. One of the survivals of the old world, the shadow of what had been the Eastern Empire, now passed suddenly away. Almost at the same date that visionary revival of the Western Empire, which had imposed for six centuries upon the imagination of medieval Europe, hampering Italy and impeding the consolidation of Germany, ceased to reckon among political actualities; while its more robust rival, the Roman Church, seemed likely to sink into the rank of a petty Italian principality. It was demonstrated by the destruction of the Eastern and the dotage of the Western Empire, and by the new papal policy which Nicholas V. inaugurated, that the old order of society was about to be superseded. Nothing remained to check those centrifugal forces in state and church which substituted a confederation of rival European powers for the earlier ideal of universal monarchy, and separate religious constitutions for the previous Catholic unity. At the same time the new learning introduced by the earlier humanists awakened free thought, encouraged curiosity, and prepared the best minds of Europe for speculative audacities from which the school men would have shrunk, and which soon expressed themselves in acts of cosmopolitan importance. If we look a little forward to the years 1492–1500, we obtain a second date of great importance. In these years the expedition of Charles VIII. to Naples opened Italy to French, Spanish and German interference. The leading nations of Europe began to compete for the prize of the peninsula, and learned meanwhile that culture which the Italians had perfected. In these years the secularization of the papacy was carried to its final point by Alexander VI., and the Reformation became inevitable. The same period was marked by the discovery of America, the exploration of the Indian seas, and the consolidation of the Spanish nationality. It also witnessed the application of printing to the diffusion of knowledge. Thus, speaking roughly, the half-century between 1450 and 1500 may be termed the culminating point of the Renaissance. he transition from the medieval to the modern order was now secured if not accomplished, and a Rubicon had been crossed from which no retrogression to the past was possible. Looking yet a little farther, to the years 1527 and 1530, a third decisive date is reached. In the first of these years happened the sack of Rome, in the second the pacification of Italy by Charles V. under a Spanish hegemony. The age of the Renaissance was now closed for the land which gave it birth. The Reformation had taken firm hold on northern Europe. The Counter-Reformation was already imminent.
It must not be imagined that so great a change as that implied by the Renaissance was accomplished without premonitory symptoms and previous endeavours. In the main we mean by it the recovery of freedom for the human spirit after a long period of bondage to oppressive ecclesiastical and political orthodoxy—a return toPrecursors of the Renaissance. the liberal and practical conceptions of the world which the nations of antiquity had enjoyed, but upon a new and enlarged platform. This being so, it was inevitable that the finally successful efforts after self-emancipation should have been anticipated from time to time by striving Within the ages that are known as dark and medieval. It is therefore part of the present inquiry to pass in review some of the claimants to be considered precursors of the Renaissance.
First of all must be named the Frank in whose lifetime the dual conception of universal empire and universal church, divinely appointed, sacred and inviolable, began to control the order of European society. Charles the Great (Charlemagne) lent his forces to the plan of resuscitating the Roman empire at a moment when his own power made him the arbiter of western Europe, when the papacy needed his alliance, and when the Eastern Empire had passed under the usurped regency of a female. He modelled an empire, Roman in name but essentially Teutonic, since it-owed such substance as its fabric possessed to Frankish armies and the sinews of the German people. As a structure composed of divers ill-connected parts it fell to pieces at its builder’s death, leaving little but the incubus of a memory, the fascination of a mighty name, to dominate the mind of medieval Europe. As an idea, the empire grew in visionar power; and remained one of the chief obstacles in the way of both Italian and German national coherence. Real force was not in it, but rather in that counterpart to its unlimited pretensions, the church, which had evolved it from barbarian night, and which used her own more vital energies for undermining the rival of her creation. Charles the Great, having proclaimed himself successor of the Caesars, was obscurely ambitious of imitating the Augusti also in the sphere of letters. He caused a scheme of humanistic education to be formulated, and gave employment at his court to rhetoricians, of whom Alcuin was the most considerable. But very little came of the revival of learning which Charles is supposed to have encouraged; and the empire he restored was accepted by the medieval intellect in a crudely theological and vaguely mystical spirit. We should, however, here remember that the study of Roman law, which was one important precursory symptom of the Renaissance, owed much to medieval respect for the empire as a divine institution. This, together with the municipal Italian intolerance of the Lombard and Frankish codes, kept alive the practice and revived the science of Latin jurisprudence at an early period.
Philosophy had attempted to free itself from the trammels of theological orthodoxy in the hardy speculations of some schoolmen, notably of Scotus Erigena and Abelard. These innovators found, however, small support, and were defeated by opponents who used the same logical weapons with authority to back them. Nor were the rationalistic opinionsSpeculation and heresy in the middle ages. of the Averroists without their value, though the church condemned these deviators from her discipline as heretics. Such medieval materialists, moreover, had but feeble hold upon the substance of real knowledge. Imperfect acquaintance with authors whom they studied in Latin translations made by Jews from Arabic commentaries on Greek texts, together with almost total ignorance of natural laws, condemned them to sterility. Like the other schiomachists of their epoch, they fought with phantoms in a visionary realm. A similar judgment may be passed upon those Paulician, Albigensian, Paterine and Epicurean dissenters from the Catholic creed who opposed the phalanxes of orthodoxy with frail imaginative weapons, and alarmed established orders in the state by the audacity of their communistic opinions. Physical science struggled into feeble life in the cells of Gerbert and Roger Bacon. But these men were accounted magicians by the vulgar; and, while the one eventually assumed the tiara, the other was incarcerated in a dungeon. The schools meanwhile resounded still to the interminable dispute upon abstractions. Are only universals real, or has each name a corresponding entity? From the midst of the Franciscans who had persecuted Roger gacon because he presumed to know more than was consistent with human humility arose John of Parma, adopting and popularizing the mystic prophecy of Joachim of Flora. The reign of the Father is ast; the reign of the Son is passing; the reign of the Spirit is at hand. Such was the formula of the Eternal Gospel, which, as an unconscious forecast of the Renaissance, has attracted retrospective students by its felicity of adaptation to their historical method. Yet we must remember that this bold intuition of the abbot Joachim indicated a monastic reaction against the tyrannies and corruptions of the church, rather than a fertile philosophical conception. The Fraticelli spiritualists, and similar sects who fed their imagination with his doctrine, expired in the flames to which Fra Dolcino Longino and Margharita were consigned. To what extent the accusations of profligate morals brought against these reforming sectarians were justified remains doubtful; and the same uncertainty rests upon the alleged iniquities of the Templars. It is only certain that at this epoch the fabric of Catholic faith was threatened with various forms of prophetic and Oriental mysticism, symptomatic of a widespread desire to grasp at something simpler, purer and less rigid than Latin theology afforded. Devoid of criticism, devoid of sound learning, devoid of a firm hold on the realities of life, these heresies passed away without solid results and were forgotten.
