by Peter Watson
Humanism was less concerned with the rediscovery of the sciences of the ancients than with re-establishing a pagan set of values, in effect the secular outlook of the Greeks and the Romans, in which man was the measure of all things. This attitude, as Petrarch was the first to realise, had been lost for about a thousand years, as Christians took heed of the warnings of Augustine against becoming ‘too engrossed’ in earthly interests, lest one’s entry into the New Jerusalem be threatened (the City of Man rather than the City of God).50 But the ancients had been more interested in a happy and fruitful life, right here on earth, than with the eternal destiny of their souls, and classical philosophy, for example, was more about how to live successfully now, than in the afterlife. The humanists took this on board. Here, for example, is Erasmus: ‘Whatsoever is pious and conduces to good manners ought not to be called profane. The first place must be given to the authority of the Scriptures; but, nevertheless, I sometimes find some things said or written by the ancients, nay, even by the heathens, nay, by the poets themselves, so chastely, so holily, and so divinely, that I cannot persuade myself but that, when they wrote them, they were divinely inspired…To confess freely among friends, I can’t read Cicero on Old Age, on Friendship…without kissing the book.’51 Erasmus had certain of his characters argue that such titles as St Socrates or St Cicero were not blasphemous.
Central to the humanist ideal was the notion that there was, in fact, a new aristocracy in Italy, which was aesthetic and educational, rather than based on inherited privilege, land or even money. It stemmed from cultural appreciation and achievement in the arts and learning, and it valued above all self-expression. The Renaissance was possibly the time above all when aesthetic theory was at its height (though Ernst Cassirer argued that the eighteenth century was even more conscious of this aspect of experience–see Chapter 29). Poetry and art were conceived as holding the secrets to the harmony of the world. This is considered in more detail in Chapter 19.
In the High Middle Ages, the intellectual revolution had shown, among other things, that the ancient authorities disagreed among themselves, and that moreover these authorities had often lived full lives without the benefit of the scriptures. At the same time, life had been communally organised–in congregations, guilds, universities. After the changes introduced by the clock, gunpowder, the plague and so on, and with growing wealth, individualism began to extend beyond the ‘academic’ world of cathedral and university. In addition, the old Middle Ages experience–of the clergy always being the better educated–also broke down as a result of the decimation of the church by the Black Death. When the introduction of printed books and silent reading was added in, the spread of individualism was more or less complete. Individualism plus wealth, whether it helped create capitalism or was itself a product of early capitalism, were jointly the first elements in what we would now call the modern way of life. In their different ways, Dante, Petrarch, Machiavelli and Montaigne wrote about intellectual freedom, individual expression, very often spiced with a scepticism towards the Christian message.52 After the invention of printing, the rise of vernacular literatures provoked diversity at the expense of uniformity. It was this constellation of beliefs that gave Renaissance thought its character.
In Renaissance philosophy, Pietro Pompanazzi (1462–c. 1525) was typical. He concluded that Aristotelianism could not prove the independent existence of the soul and though he did not deny the soul’s immortality, he thought that the question was insoluble and that, therefore, a system of ethics based on rewards and punishments after death was meaningless. Instead, he thought we should construct a system that related to this life. ‘The reward of virtue is virtue itself,’ he said, ‘while the punishment of the vicious is vice.’ The religious authorities looked on Pompanazzi with disfavour and he only escaped the stake because of his great friendship with Cardinal Pietro Bembo (1470–1547) who was himself an admirer of pagan/classical thought. But Pompanazzi’s books were burned.
Nevertheless, his philosophy shows how views were beginning to change and that change included a growth in scepticism of a sort. Erasmus, Peter Ramus (1515–1572), Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592), Pierre Charron (1541–1603), Francisco Sánchez (1562–1632) and Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) could all be called sceptics; though none of them were sceptics in the way that Hume or Voltaire would become sceptics, all objected to the pedantry of the schoolmen, the dogmatism of the theologians and the superstitions of mystics. Erasmus remarked that it made him ‘angry and weary’ to read Duns Scotus.53 (This scepticism, the ‘third force’ in seventeenth-century thought, to use Richard Popkins’ phrase, is considered more fully in Chapter 25.)
A great linguist and scholar, a fine Latin stylist, and a much-travelled sceptic, Erasmus was the most famous of the humanists, just as Aquinas was the most famous scholastic and Voltaire the most famous rationalist.54 Born in Holland about 1466, his mind dominated intellectual Europe for a generation. One of his friends once said, ‘I am pointed out in public as the man who has received a letter from Erasmus.’55 His mother and father both died when he was in his early teens and his guardian sent him to a monastery. This might have been a dead-end, but in 1492 he became a priest and moved to the court of the bishop of Cambraiand then on to his goal, the University of Paris. This was a great disappointment, however, for once there Erasmus found the great institution much diminished and the verbal wrangles of the scholastics dry and rigid, preoccupied with sterile detail, harking back to the arguments of Duns Scotus, William of Ockham and Aquinas. The mind of the once-great university had withered.56
If Paris was a formative influence on Erasmus in a negative sense, the visit he made to England in 1499, where he met Thomas More, William Grocyn, Thomas Linacre, John Colet and other English humanists, changed his life fundamentally for the better. To Erasmus these pious and even ascetic men nevertheless seemed the perfect combination of classical scholars and devout Christians. These were generous souls, he felt, in honest pursuit of the truth, unblemished by the petty squabbles and arid self-defences of the Paris schoolmen. In the house of Sir Thomas More, he glimpsed what he came to realise should be his life’s work–the reconciliation of Christianity with the classics. Not the classics as understood by Aquinas, of course, which had mainly been the Aristotelian canon, but the newer discoveries, which treated Plato as central. For Erasmus, Plato, Cicero and the others were a revelation. ‘When I read certain passages of these great men,’ he wrote, ‘I can hardly refrain from saying, St Socrates, pray for me.’57 This feeling was so strong that when he returned from England, and though he was already thirty-four, he set about learning Greek, so he could read his beloved classics in the original. It took him three years. Now began the most frantic time of his life as he translated and edited the works of antiquity. By 1500 he had formed a collection of eight hundred or so Adages, sayings and epithets from the Latin classics, which went into several popular editions. He didn’t turn his back on Christianity, however, and still found time to produce his own translation of the Bible (Greek on one page, Latin on the facing page), together with editions of the Church Fathers.
In 1509 Henry VII of England died. Erasmus’ friends wrote to him and urged him to come to England in the hope of finding advancement under Henry VIII. Then in Italy, Erasmus set out for England straight away, and while he was crossing the Alps he conceived the idea for what was to become his most famous work, The Praise of Folly. This satire on monkish life was written in a week, while he stayed again at the house of Sir Thomas More. As a form of acknowledgment Erasmus entitled the work Moriae Encomium. Published in 1511, it was an instant success, and was translated into many languages. For a later edition, in 1517, Hans Holbein the Younger, then eighteen, added a set of drawings in the margins, making this surely one of the most beautiful, interesting and valuable books of all time. It also inspired a whole genre of satiric works, including those by Rabelais. The ‘humour’ of this book seems pretty heavy-handed to us today, as Erasmus lays into the sloth and
stupidity and greed of the monks, but in the spirit of the times he seems to have judged his tone just right, in that his readers could laugh along with him without seriously questioning their beliefs. The fool had been a familiar figure in medieval stories and dramas and it was this genre that Erasmus evoked. As Petrarch had provided two messages–aesthetics and Plato–so Erasmus had two messages: that the classics were a noble and honourable source of knowledge and pleasure, and that the church was increasingly empty, pompous and intolerant.58
Tolerance, in particular religious tolerance, was a particular aspect of humanism with long-term consequences and here the names of Crotus Rubianus, Ulrich von Hutten and Michel de Montaigne shine through. Letters of Obscure Men, by Rubianus and von Hutten, is often called the most devastating satire before Swift. Its origins were complex. A German Jew, Johann Pfefferkorn, had converted to Christianity. Like many converts, he had become wildly fanatical in his new belief and proposed that Jews who had not seen the light as he had should be forced to attend Christian churches and be forbidden from lending money at interest. He also wanted all Jewish books save for the Old Testament to be burned. Because of who he was, or had been, Pfefferkorn’s views were taken seriously and the opinions of many German clerics and scholars were canvassed. One of them, John Reuchlin, after considering the subject, concluded that, on the contrary, Jewish literature was to be praised, by and large, though he did concede that certain mystical works be discarded. And so, instead of approving Pfefferkorn’s ideas, he took the opposite stance and went on to suggest that a chair of Hebrew should be established in all universities ‘in order that Gentiles might become better acquainted with, and therefore more tolerant of, Jewish literature’.59 Anti-Semites everywhere were enraged by this but Reuchlin received letters of support from many of his distinguished friends, some of which he published under the title Letters of Eminent Men. It was this that suggested to Rubianus and von Hutten a satire on the persecutors of Reuchlin. Published in 1515, Letters of Obscure Men purported to be a collection of missives written by lesser priests and ignorant churchmen to a real person, Ortuin Gratius, a leading German Dominican who at that time epitomised the bigotry and pedantry of the scholastics. Part of the point of the Letters was its coarseness and absurdity (the drunken churchmen ask whether it is a mortal sin to salute a Jew, when the chick in the egg becomes meat and is therefore forbidden on Fridays), but it was a major assault on scholastic pedantry, which never afterwards regained its former prestige.60
The other main achievement/effect of humanism was in education. So complete was its triumph that the language and literature of pagan antiquity became the basis of the curriculum, a position of pre-eminence which still exists in many places. This classical curriculum was first adopted in the Italian universities, from where it spread to Paris, Heidelberg, Leipzig, Oxford and Cambridge. The humanistic curriculum was introduced to Cambridge by Erasmus himself and to the universities of Germany by men such as Agricola, Reuchlin and Melanchthon. Erasmus advocated humanistic education all over Europe and he was enthusiastically supported in England by Thomas More and Roger Ascham and in France by Le Fèvre d’Étaples and Guillaume Budé. Under the influence of the humanists the universities became more tolerant of science, in particular mathematics. Medicine also spread, as we shall see in a later chapter.
In 1517, the year Hans Holbein the Younger added his illustrations to The Praise of Folly, Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses on indulgences to the door of Wittenberg church. Erasmus shared many of Luther’s misgivings about the church but temperamentally the two men were very different. In early 1517, months before Luther took decisive action, he had written as follows about Erasmus: ‘Human considerations prevail with him much more than the divine.’ For a humanist, it was a back-handed compliment.
Unlike Luther, Erasmus knew that to push criticism of the church too far would only result in intransigence on both sides, a stand-off that would allow no movement and might actually prevent the sort of change they both wanted to see. The following exchange of letters between the two men sums up their differences and goes to the root of what humanism tried to achieve. ‘Greeting,’ Luther wrote. ‘Often as I converse with you and you with me, Erasmus, our glory and our hope, we do not yet know one another. Is that not extraordinary?…For who is there whose innermost parts Erasmus has not penetrated, whom Erasmus does not teach, in whom Erasmus does not reign?…Wherefore, dear Erasmus, learn, if it please you, to know this little brother in Christ also; he is assuredly your very zealous friend, though he otherwise deserves, on account of his ignorance, only to be buried in a corner, unknown even to your sun and climate.’ Erasmus’s reply was tactful but crystal clear. ‘Dearest brother in Christ, your epistle showing the keenness of your mind and breathing a Christian spirit, was most pleasant to me. I cannot tell you what a commotion your books are raising here [at Louvain]. These men cannot be by any means disabused of the suspicion that your works are written by an aide and that I am, as they call it, the standard-bearer of your party…I have testified to them that you are entirely unknown to me, that I have not read your books and neither approve nor disapprove anything…I try to keep neutral, so as to help the revival of learning as much as I can. And it seems to me that more is accomplished by civil modesty than by impetuosity.’61
After Luther was excommunicated in 1520, Albrecht Dürer appealed to Erasmus to take the side of Luther, but he wrote back that he had not the strength for martyrdom and that if ‘tumult’ should arise, ‘I should imitate Peter.’
But, despite his moderation, Erasmus couldn’t entirely escape the fight. Catholic bigots accused him of laying the eggs ‘which Luther and Zwingli hatched’ and The Praise of Folly was placed on the Index of Prohibited Books, while Erasmus himself was condemned by the Council of Trent as ‘an impious heretic’. In other words, he was welcome in neither camp. This was perhaps inevitable but it was no less tragic for all that. Erasmus had lived, or tried to live, the ideal life of a humanist, as someone who believed in the life of the mind, that virtue could be based on humanity, that tolerance was as virtuous as fanatical certitude, that thoughtful men could become good men and that those who were familiar with the works of all ages could live more happily and, yes, more justly, in their own time.
In an earlier chapter we saw how the rise of Latin scholarship had helped unify Europe. The Reformation, considered in a later chapter, had strong nationalistic elements–for example, Luther was undeniably German and Henry VIII implacably English. There were scholars who came after Erasmus who were no less cosmopolitan than he (Lipsius, Grotius) but, in a sense, he was the last truly European figure.
Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574) thought that the Florentine Renaissance was due to a change in human nature. He thought that rivalry, envy, the search for glory and fame had helped propel change in the city, that life now moved faster in the bourgeois world of merchant and banker. Nowadays, we are more apt to see these feelings and ways of behaving as symptoms of the change, rather than causes. Nevertheless, the new sensibility does need to be explored.
It was in Florence for instance that our modern idea of the artist as a genius and bohemian, operating by his own rules, was first aired. It arose out of an adaptation of ancient medicine. At that time, the four temperaments as identified by Hippocrates (choleric, sanguine, phlegmatic and melancholic) were still in use, though added to them was a system of ‘correspondences’. For example, the sanguine temperament, believed to be explained by the preponderance of blood, made men quiet, happy, disposed to love and was associated with Venus and the spring. Melancholics, explained by the preponderance of black bile (hence ‘melan’-‘cholic’), were associated with Saturn and autumn. But Aristotle had suggested that all great men were melancholics and the humanist Marsilio Ficino built on this, adding in Plato’s notion of inspiration as divinely inspired frenzy (furor). This picture, of the artist as a moody genius, proved enduring.62
But the greatest psychological change in the Renaissance, f
irst drawn attention to by Jacob Burckhardt but added to by others since then, was the rise in individuality. Peter Burke says there are three aspects to this: a rise in self-consciousness, a growth of competitiveness (linked to capitalism?) and an increased interest in the uniqueness of people. The increase in self-portraits, autobiographies and diaries–greater even than in the period between 1050 and 1200–was one aspect, as was the innovation of ‘how to do it’ books, such as Machiavelli’s Prince, Castiglione’s Courtier and Aretino’s Ragionamenti, where the emphasis, as often as not, is on technique and on choice, meaning that individuals could select from alternatives whichever suited their character, pocket, or whim.63 At much the same time, flat, non-distorting mirrors were first produced in bulk in fifteenth-century Italy (in Venice, mainly) and these too are held to have been important in promoting self-consciousness. A carnival song about mirrors in sixteenth-century Florence highlights this aspect. Translated into plain text it reads: ‘A man’s own defects can be perceived in the glass, defects which are not easy to see like those of others. So a man can take his own measure and say, “I will be a better man than I have been”.’64 Then there was Castiglione’s idea of sprezzatura, nonchalance, that everything should be calculated to look natural–and this too was an aspect of self-consciousness, a reflection that individual style matters.65
Burckhardt further argued that the modern sense of fame was born in the Renaissance, though other scholars have dismissed this, arguing that the chivalry of knights in the Middle Ages embodied the same psychology. Peter Burke, however, finds that in the literature of the Renaissance words that imply self-assertiveness, competition and a desire for fame were very common–for example, emulation, competition, glory, rivalry, envy, honour, shame and, above all, valour or worth (valore, virtù).66 Burckhardt himself noted the new use of singolare and unico as terms of praise, and Vasari, for instance, had this to say: ‘Rivalry and competition, by which a man seeks by great works to conquer and overcome those more distinguished than himself in order to acquire honour and glory, is a praiseworthy thing.’67 The cult of fame is generally regarded as one of the most important products of humanism. ‘The study of antiquity brought fresh contact with a generally pagan concept of personal glory–“famam extendere factis, / hoc uirtutis opus” (to broaden fame with actions, this is the task of virtue; Aeneid 10.468–9)–and the sheer survival of the classical records of such achievement gave force to the possibility that contemporary efforts might similarly endure.’68 There was a sense of ‘vertigo’ associated with individualism, say William Kerrigan and Gordon Braden, and they quote Machiavelli: ‘I am entirely convinced of this: that it is better to be impetuous than cautious, because fortune is a woman, and it is necessary, if one wishes to hold her down, to beat her and fight with her.’69
