A world lit only by fire: the medieval mind and the Renaissance : portrait of an age

by William Manchester

  Skepticism, and then sacrilege, became stylish among his colleagues. In 1514 Eoban Hesse, a protégé of Celtis, published Heroides Christianae, a volume written in flawless Latin. Actually, as Durant points out, the work was a clever parody of Ovid. Only accomplished Latinists could recognize the style, however. Others, taking it at face value, were appalled. Hesse had forged blasphemous documents profaning the sacred origins of Christianity. Among his apocrypha, which the credulous accepted as genuine, were passionate love letters from Mary Magdalene to Jesus and, even more shocking, from the Virgin Mary (whose virginity was exposed as myth) to God the Father, Domine Deus. Subtly exploiting the plural definition of dominus, which may mean “lover” as well as “father,” Hesse implied that the missives had been sent to a rake who had been cuckolding Joseph of Nazareth, and by whom she had conceived Jesus.

  Nowhere was the faith of humanists so fragile as in Celtis’s homeland. Elsewhere, his adversaries, the German defenders of Christianity, would not have been considered Christian at all. One of them, Conradus Mutianus Rufus, gave lip service to the Church, arguing that ceremonies and creeds should be judged on their moral effects, not their literal claims; if they encouraged private virtue and a disciplined society, he said solemnly, they should be accepted unquestioningly. Mutianus wrote: “I shall turn my studies to piety, and will learn nothing from poets, philosophers, or historians, save what can promote a Christian life.” According to Durant, he was attempting to marry “skepticism with religion.” If so, his efforts ended in the divorce courts, and the blame lay with him. His public professions of piety appear to have been mere pap, intended to mollify orthodox congregations resentful of Celtis. He was singing a different song with undergraduates, and it bore no resemblance to a hymn. In Gotha, J. M. Robertson writes, Mutianus taught his students that Masses for the dead were worthless, fasts ineffectual, and confessions both pointless and embarrassing. The Bible, he said, was a book of fables; only a Dummkopf could listen to the trials of Job and Jonah without laughing. The crucifixion was absurd. So was baptism, and if paradise really existed, the Romans and Greeks who had lived decent lives were already there. According to Mandell Creighton, a scholar of the Reformation, Mutianus urged undergraduates to “esteem the decrees of philosophers above those of priests,” but he advised them to hide their agnosticism from the masses. “By faith,” he explained, “we mean not the conformity with fact of what we say, but an opinion about divinity based on credulity and persuasiveness, which leads to profit.” Over his door he hung the motto Beata Tranquillitas, honoring tranquillity. It should have read Beata Simulatio, praising hypocrisy.

  BUT GERMANY was unique, Christendom’s greatest headache, presenting difficulties so vexing that there must have been times when pontiffs wished it had been left unconverted. Elsewhere European eruditum—with a few striking exceptions, which would emerge later—was made up of devout men who, like the artists responsible for St. Peter’s new majesty, reflected glory on the Church. The Vatican had been hospitable to the emerging Renaissance from the outset, and saw no reason for regret.

  It would. Humanism, the Holy See would bitterly learn, led to the greatest threat the Church had ever faced. Actually it posed two threats. Martin Luther identified the first when he wrote: “Reason is the greatest enemy that faith has; it struggles against the divine word, treating with contempt all that emanates from God. The Virgin birth was unreasonable; so was the Resurrection; so were the Gospels, the sacraments, the pontifical prerogatives, and the promise of life everlasting.” If you were a believer, you never subjected piety to the test of logic. Intellectuals, however, found logic an irresistible attraction, and therein lay their menace.

  The second threat was inherent in the medieval Church’s preoccupation with the afterlife. As early as A.D. 166 Lucian had defined Christians as “men who are persuaded that they will survive death and live forever; in consequence, they despise death and are willing to sacrifice their lives to that faith.” Belief in a life everlasting lay at the very center of Christianity. To true Christians, life on earth was almost irrelevant. During it they obeyed the precepts of Catholicism to safeguard their future in paradise, disciplined by the fear that if they didn’t, they might lose it. The thought of living for the sheer sake of living, celebrating mortal existence before God took them unto his own, was subversive of the entire structure. Yet that was precisely the prospect humanism offered. The new scholars took their worldly scripture from the first surviving fragment of Plato’s Protagoran dialogue: “Man is the measure of all things.”

  Abandoning the past’s preoccupation with eternity, humanists preached enrichment of life in the here and now. Their message, reversing ten centuries of solemnity, was hearty—an expression of confidence that men would learn to understand, and then master, natural forces, that they could grasp the nature of the universe, even shape their individual destinies. Those steeped in the habitude of the Middle Ages should have recognized this as a dangerous heresy, eclipsing the pitiful defiance of a Savonarola, but they didn’t. The prestige of the scholars, and the eminence of their supporters, obscured the enormity of the challenge. So did confusion over the relationship between the artists of the Renaissance, who were above controversy, and the militant humanists. Those who translate revolutionary concepts into action are never as acceptable, or even as respectable, as those who express themselves indirectly. Humanism, by its very character, implied a revolt against all religious authority. It still does; the evangelists who denounce “secular humanism” five centuries later recognize the true adversary of fundamentalism.

  As the apostasy grew, its character would slowly become clear to those who remained blindly loyal to the old Catholicism — to men like England’s Sir John Fortescue, His Majesty’s chief justice, who, after paying fulsome tribute to his country’s laws, an Englishman’s right to trial by jury, and the principle that civilized sovereigns should be law-abiding servants of those over whom they reigned, ended with a baffling non sequitur. All governments, he wrote, must be subject to the pope, “usque ad pedum oscula,”—“even to kissing his feet.”

  Men whose dedication to the papacy extended that far would ultimately come to realize that the humanists were moving in a very different direction. They had begun as pure scholars dedicated to the rediscovery of Latin, and then Greek, classics. But their emphasis on wisdom not derived from religious sources had led them to turn away from the supernatural. They did not reject it—not yet, at any rate not outside Germany. Their movement was still transitional; the change was one of emphasis, toward a new faith which held that man’s happiness and welfare in this lifetime should come first, taking precedence over what might or might not follow it, that mankind’s highest ethical objective is not the salvation of his soul but the earthly good of all humanity.

  EVEN AFTER it had become obvious that medieval Christianity and the reawakened reason of the ancient world were on a collision course, the clash was not abrupt. Critics of the new intellectualism approached the issue cautiously, beginning, in an early reference to it, with a straightforward (if restrictive)definition: “The Humanist, I meane him that affects the knowledge of State affairs, Histories, [et cetera].” True believers began to draw a distinction—it was to be observed for more than a century—between “secular writers” (humanists) and “divines,” or “devines” (themselves). Then a scholar was singled out for oblique censure: “I might repute him as a good humanist, but not a good devine.”

  By then the divines were ready to fight, and the first quarrel they opened—over higher education—was one the humanists, it seemed, could hardly ignore. Proper university instruction, wrote one cleric, should consist in “deliuering a direct order of construction for the releefe of weake Grammacists, not in tempting by curious deuise and disposition to conte [content] courtly Humanists.” But the flung gauntlet was ignored. Another divine described the spectrum of learning as arching from “the strictest Roman Catholicism,” representing perfection, to “the nakedest huma
nism.” This too provoked no response. An abusive reference to “heathen-minded Humanists” was followed by another, to “their system—usually called Humanism,” which, the writer explained, sought “to level all family distinctions, all differences of rank, all nationality, all positive moral obligations, all positive religion, and to train all mankind to be as … the highest accomplishment.” These were absurd charges, easily refuted, but no learned scholar bothered to do it, and the divines, never an intellectual match for those they sought to draw, were reduced to limning the plight of a man bereft of his soul: “With the accession of humanistic ideas, he had lost all belief in the Christian religion.”

  Although the issue was profound, discussion of it remained a monologue. The humanists were hardly inarticulate; they were merely reserving their concern for immediate issues, such as the gross abuse of authority in the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Here the divines tried to intervene as amicus curiae. One asked sarcastically: “What a Discovery is it … that Vice raged at Court? Is it but the Hackney Observation of all Humanists?” In a sense it was exactly that; eminent spokesmen for humanism were discovering vice in parishes, dioceses, monastic orders, and, above all, in the Holy See, and if they sounded hackneyed it was because repetition is unavoidable when the same offenses turn up again and again.

  Reflective men make uncomfortable prosecutors. By nature and by training, they tend to see the other side and give it equal weight. Clerical misconduct aroused the anger of some humanists, but others, bred to be devout, found the matter disturbing. They searched for compromises, envying painters and sculptors who could overlook the goings-on in Rome. Not all artists did, however. The shrewdest of them, aware that the papacy was spending fortunes on Vatican art even as famine stalked Europe, suspected the Vatican of exploiting them, tightening its grip on the masses by overawing them with beauty. One surprise rebel was Michelangelo, in his role as coarchitect for the new St. Peter’s. Pope Leo ordered exquisite Tuscan marble from the remote Pietrasanta range. The artist balked. Bringing it out, he said, would be too expensive. Unaware of Michelangelo’s mutiny, but thinking along the same lines, Martin Luther objected to the vast sums being raised for reconstruction of the great cathedral’s basilica. Luther was a man of faith, not reason. Nevertheless Leo’s prodigality troubled him. If the pope could see the poverty of the German people, he wrote, “he would rather see St. Peter’s lying in ashes than that it should be built out of the blood and hide of his sheep.”

  Michelangelo had a choice. Luther’s conscience denied him one. That was also true of other troubled clerics, scholars, writers, and philosophers. They had to speak out. Change was imperative. Only the informed and the literate could demand it, and in the Europe of that time, they were few. At the outset, their objective was rehabilitation of the system, but this revolution, like Saturn—like all revolutions—was destined to eat its own children.

  To them this was tragic. The doctrine that the Church was perfect, that the very idea of change was heretical, deeply disturbed learned Catholics, leaving them torn between faith and reason. In the eyes of Rome, Copernicus had died an apostate who had tried to subvert Ptolemaic theory, endorsed by the Church in the second century, more than two hundred popes earlier. But the solar system would not go away. It was too enormous. Within a century

  Michelangelo’s cupola of St. Peter’s, seen from the rear

  Galileo Galilei of Florence would confirm the Copernican system. Summoned to Rome, he, too, was found guilty of heresy. When he persisted in publishing his findings, he was called before the Inquisition, where, in 1633, under threat of torture, he disavowed his belief in a revolving earth. As he left the tribunal, however, he was heard to mutter, “Epur si muove” (“And yet it does move”). His recantation therefore was judged inadequate. He died blind and in disgrace. More than two centuries later, Thomas Henry Huxley, eulogizing him, scorned the Church as “the one great spiritual organization which is able to resist, and must, as a matter of life and death, resist, the progress of science and modern civilization.”

  But there had been little science and no modern civilization in the Dark Ages, when acceptance of papal supremacy by all Christendom had rescued a continent from chaos. Faith had literally held Europe together then, giving hope to men who had been without it. The most callous despots of the time, fearing God’s wrath, had yielded to papal commands, permitting the Church to intervene when princes had been devouring one another, forcing them to submit to the argument that temporal rulers must yield to the one authority whose sacraments promised eternal salvation. Eminent Catholics knew that. And their piety was central to their personal lives. Now, though torn by inner conflict, they would shred “the seamless robe of Christ.” Jesus, commanding Peter to build his Church, had predicted that “the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” The gates of hell hadn’t; instead the terrible task of destroying the inviolability of the one true faith fell upon the devout, who prayed that they be spared it, and whose prayers were to be unanswered.

  ERASMUS, THE SON of a priest, was a fastidious insomniac who spent much of his life in monasteries. Throughout the coming turmoil he remained an orthodox Catholic, never losing his love of Christ, the Gospels, and rites that comforted the masses. In his Colloquia familiaria he wrote: “If anything is in common use with Christians that is not repugnant to the Holy Scriptures, I observe it for this reason, that I may not offend other people.” Public controversy seemed to him an affront; though his doubts about clerical abuses were profound, he kept them to himself until he was well into his forties. “Piety,” he wrote in a private letter, “requires that we should sometimes conceal truth, that we should take care not to show it always, as if it did not matter when, where, or to whom we show it. … Perhaps we must admit with Plato that lies are useful to the people.”

  These were reassuring words in the College of Cardinals, where, in 1509, Erasmus, then in his early forties, was a guest. His hosts yearned for serenity; they were weary of the bellicose Pope Julius II, who was forever invading this or that nearby duchy, on one pretext or another, and they had become troubled by the increase in indiscretions of humanists who were more aggressive and more outspoken than Erasmus. Among the first to arouse the Vatican’s displeasure had been Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, whose father, the ruler of a minor Italian principality, had hired tutors to give his precocious son a thorough humanist education.

  The mature Pico developed a gift for combining the best elements from other philosophies with his own work, and his scholarship had been widely admired until he argued that the Hebrew Cabalistic doctrine, an esoteric Jewish mysticism, supported Christian theology. Greek and Latin scholarship were fashionable in Rome; but the suggestion of an affinity between Jewish thought and the Gospels was unwelcome. Pico drew up nine hundred theological, ethical, mathematical, and philosophical theses which Christianity had drawn from Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, and Latin sources and, in 1486, proposing to defend his position against any opponent, invited humanists from all over the continent to Rome to debate them. No one arrived. They weren’t allowed to enter the city. The pope had intervened. A papal commission denounced over a dozen of Pico’s theses as heretical, and he was ordered to publish an Apologia regretting his forbidden thoughts. Even after he had complied, he was warned of further trouble. Fleeing to France, he was arrested, briefly imprisoned, and, on his release—another sign of the age—was poisoned by his secretary.

  Pico’s ordeal had been followed by the even more awkward Reuchlin affair. Johannes Reuchlin, a Bavarian humanist, had become fluent in Hebrew and taught it to his Tübingen students.

  Then, in 1509, Johannes Pfefferkorn, a Dominican monk who was also a converted rabbi, published Judenspiegel (Mirror of the Jews), an anti-Semitic book proposing that all works in Hebrew, including the Talmud, be burned. Reuchlin, dismayed by the possibility of such desecration, formally protested to the emperor. Jewish scholarship should not be suppressed, he argued. Rather, two chairs in Hebrew should be established
at every German university. Pfefferkorn, he wrote, was an anti-intellectual “ass.” Furious, the rabbi who had become a monk struck back with Handspiegel (Hand Mirror), accusing Reuchlin of being on the payroll of the Jews. Reuchlin’s riposte, Augenspiegel (Eyeglass), so outraged the Dominicans that the order, supported by the obscurantist clergy throughout Europe, lodged a charge of heresy against him with the tribunal of the Inquisition in Cologne. The controversy raged for six years. Five universities in France and Germany burned Reuchlin’s books, but in the end he was triumphant. Erasmus and Ulrich von Hutten, Maximilian’s new poet laureate, were among those who rallied to his side. An episcopal court acquitted him, Pfefferkorn’s fire was canceled, and the teaching of Hebrew spread, using Reuchlin’s grammar, Rudimentia Hebraica, as the universities’ basic text.

  Because Erasmus was in Rome when this dispute broke out, his opinion was solicited. His mild reply—that he believed the issue could be solved by quiet compromise—endeared him to his hosts. They first urged him to prolong his stay, then offered him an ecclesiastical sinecure, suggesting that he settle among them permanently. Because of his eminence he had been courted in every other European capital. This seemed the ultimate opportunity, however, and he was at the point of accepting it when word arrived that the king of England had just died. Erasmus had known the new monarch, Henry VIII, since Henry’s boyhood. Both were ardent Catholics, and while he was debating his future a personal letter from Henry reached him, proposing that “you abandon all thought of settling elsewhere. Come to England, and assure yourself of a hearty welcome. You shall name your own terms; they shall be as liberal and honourable as you please.”