Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 20.djvu/400

382 RENAISSANCE received gladly. Its vast significance was hardly under- stood. Both secular and spiritual potentates delighted in the beauty and fascination of those eloquent words which scholars, poets, and critics uttered " words indeed, but words which drew armed hosts behind them ! " ates If we look a little forward to the years 1492-1500, we 492- obtain a second date of great importance. In these years 500 the expedition of Charles VIII. to Naples opened Italy to ml 1530. Fj-g,^ 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, the revolution effected in military operations by the use of gunpowder, and the revolution in cosmology which resulted from the Copernican discovery. Thus, speaking roughly, the half century between 1450 and 1500 may be termed the culminating point of the Renaissance. The transition from the mediaeval 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. recur. It must not be imagined that so great a change as that ors of implied by the Renaissance was accomplished without pre- ie Re- monitory symptoms and previous endeavours. In the ice- main we mean by it the recovery of freedom for the human spirit after a long period of bondage to oppressive ecclesias- tical and political orthodoxy, -*-a return to the liberal and practical conceptions of the world which the nations of antiquity had enjoyed, but upon a new and enlarged plat- form. This being so, it was inevitable that the finally suc- cessful efforts after self-emancipation should have been anticipated from time to time by strivings within the ages that are known as dark and mediaeval. It is therefore part of the present inquiry to pass in review some of the claim- ants to be considered precursors of the Renaissance. First of all must be named the Frank in whose lifetime the dual conception of universal empireand universal church, divinely appointed, sacred, and inviolable, began to control the order of European society. Charles the Great 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 a spurious Roman empire, which was surnamed "Holy," in consequence of the diplomatic contract struck by him with the bishop of Rome, and in obedience to the prevailing theological beliefs of Latin Christianity. The Holy so-called Roman but essentially Teutonic empire owed such substance as the fabric possessed to Frankish armies and the sinews of the German people. As a struc- ture 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 mediaeval Europe. As an idea, the empire grew in visionary 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, whic 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 mediaeval intellect in a crudely theological and vaguely mystical spirit. AVe should, however, here remember that the study of Roman law, which was one important precursory symptom of the Renaissance, owed much to mediaeval 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 attempted to free itself from the trammels Spec of theological orthodoxy in the hardy speculations of tion some schoolmen, notably of Scotus Erigena and Abclard. .^ These innovators found, however, small support, and were Ages defeated by opponents who used the same logical weapons with authority to back them. Nor were the rationalistic opinions of the Averroists without their value, though the church condemned these deviators from her discipline as heretics. Such mediaeval 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 com- mentaries 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 judg- ment 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 Bacon 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 past ; 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 Margharitawere 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