Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (97 page)

A phrase now frequently used as a synonym for humanism, 'the New Learning', is best avoided, because although it was indeed used in the sixteenth century, it described something different: it was an abusive Catholic term for Protestant or evangelical theology, and that is by no means the same as humanism.
³⁷
By contrast, a term usefully associated with humanism is 'Renaissance': something new was happening in Europe between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, although it was seen as a rediscovery of something very old. The fourteenth-century Italian humanist poet Petrarch so admired the poetic achievements of his older contemporary Dante Alighieri that he proclaimed that they represented a 'rebirth' ('
renascita
') of poetry as good as anything which had been written in ancient Rome. Nineteenth-century scholars then used this word in its French form (
Renaissance
) to describe the cultural phenomenon which the humanists represented.

There were good reasons for humanism and the Renaissance to take their origins from fourteenth-century Italy. More spectacularly than anywhere else in western Europe, the Italian peninsula had the advantage of 'the encyclopaedia of antiquity buried beneath it': the physical legacy of art and architecture from the heart of the Roman Empire which might be seen as mocking the achievement of medieval Italians.
³⁸
Besides this, Italy had its special political conditions: it exhibited greater contrasts in forms of government than elsewhere in Europe, and experienced ruinous confrontations between popes and Holy Roman Emperors played out in the peninsula between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, the factional warfare of papal 'Guelphs' versus imperial 'Ghibellines'. Citizens of the great cities and the principalities of Italy, impelled by circumstances to consider the nature of government, looked for diverse precedents in the most impressive and successful commonwealths in the history books, the cities of Classical Greece and republican or imperial Rome.
³⁹

The rediscovery of texts had galvanized intellectual life in ninth- and in twelfth-century Europe to create two earlier Renaissances. But now the impact was far more widely spread, because the technology of printing on paper opened up rapid possibilities of distributing copies of the texts, and gave much greater incentives for the spread of literacy associated with these innovations. This meant that the new haul of rediscovered ancient manuscripts, often lying neglected in cathedral or monastery libraries since earlier bursts of enthusiasm for the past, had a much greater impact than before, once they had been brought back into scholarly consciousness. Moreover, many more Greek manuscripts re-emerged from this latest treasure hunt. Paradoxically, the Ottoman conquests which so terrorized Europe tipped the balance in the supply of manuscripts, bringing Greek culture west. Medieval western Europe had access to remarkably little Greek literature; the text of even such a central work of literature as Homer's epics was hardly known until the fifteenth century. Few scholars had any more than the vaguest knowledge of the Greek language. If they knew a learned language other than Latin, it was likely to be Hebrew, for the good reason that while there were virtually no Greeks in the west, there were plenty of argumentative and ingenious Jewish rabbis with an awkward ability to question Christianity, forcing refutations with reference to their own Hebrew literature. Now, however, Western humanists needed Greek if they were to make use of the texts suddenly available.

Greek manuscripts came in the baggage of scholars fleeing from the wreckage of Christian commonwealths in the east, or were snapped up by Western entrepreneurs profiting from the catastrophe. Especially significant was the presence of the great Greek philosopher Georgios Gemistos Plethon at the negotiations for reunion at the Council of Florence at the turn of the 1430s and 1440s (see pp. 492-3), because he was a charismatic exponent of Plato. While the Greek Church establishment posthumously repudiated Gemistos after the fall of Constantinople (see pp. 495-6), the Medici rulers of Florence celebrated his scholarship, and commissioned the equally gifted Marsilio Ficino to translate Plato into Latin. Plato's reappearance was especially significant, because twelfth- and thirteenth-century Western scholasticism had been shaped by the rediscovery of his very different pupil Aristotle. Now Plato's attitude to the ultimate problems of philosophy, his sense that the greatest reality lay beyond visible and quantifiable reality, disposed humanists to disrespect the whole style of scholastic learning, its careful distinctions and definitions. Indeed, Ficino saw Plato as having been providentially provided by God to illuminate the Christian message, first through Origen but now once more in his own city, and he viewed contemporary exponents of Aristotle as 'wholly destructive of religion'.
⁴⁰

Ficino's insight that Plato's writings had profoundly affected early Christian thought was one of humanism's legacies to our understanding of Christianity, long after his apocalyptic excitement had faded. One of the most important and distinctive features of Western Christian culture is its capacity to stand back from societies, both its own and others, and its yearning to understand past cultures in their own terms. In 1440 a group of humanist friends, headed by the architect and writer on art theory Leon Battista Alberti and encouraged by the local lord Cardinal Prospero Colonna, attempted the first major conscious venture in a scholarly exploration which had virtually no precedent in the ancient world, certainly none among its respected intellectual disciplines: archaeology. In the presence of an excited crowd and virtually all the leading men of the papal court, they tried to raise from the depths of Lake Nemi one of two giant Roman ships lying below: pleasure-craft commissioned by the Emperor Caligula, if they had but known. Their efforts succeeded in tearing the hulk apart but, undeterred by their own destructiveness, they analysed the fragments they retrieved and taught themselves about lost techniques of Roman shipbuilding. The Pope reapplied some of their findings to roof construction in the churches of Rome. These pioneer archaeologists had learned almost for the first time how artefacts from the past might be witnesses to its strangeness, its difference, as well as how the present might gain from the discovery. They could apply the same thought to written texts.
⁴¹

Alongside their exhilarating rediscovery of Greek, humanists gained new perspectives on Latin language and culture. They developed great enthusiasm for the first-century-BCE politician-turned-philosopher Marcus Tullius Cicero ('Tully' to his English-speaking admirers). Civic humanists appreciated Cicero's detailed discussion of government, disregarding the inconvenient fact that he had been a very unsuccessful politician, and when in 1421 Cicero's treatise on oratory was rediscovered in the cathedral library at Lodi in northern Italy, the new book sealed his reputation as the ideal model for powerful and persuasive Latin prose. It became the ambition of every cultivated young scholar to write just like Cicero, given inevitable adjustments like newly coined words for printing, gunpowder and cannon-fire.
⁴²
This humanist literary style was very different from the Latin which scholastic philosophers and theologians had spoken and written over the previous few centuries; one can tell a humanist prose composition from a scholastic text merely by seeing how the sentences are constructed and the sort of vocabulary used.

The contrast became even more obvious when humanist manuscript writers painstakingly mimicked the 'Roman' characteristics of what they took to be ancient script - in fact, it was the minuscule used by Carolingian copyists of older manuscripts in that earlier 'Renaissance' (see pp. 352-3). Some southern European printers then imitated their script, producing a typeface similar to what you are reading here, and completely unlike the Gothic type which other printers used in imitation of medieval manuscript 'bookhand'. A further imitation of a cursive, more rapidly written script which humanists developed from minuscule produced an 'italic' form of the new typefaces. This tribute to a slightly misunderstood past was paralleled in the Renaissance's architectural and artistic revolution, which began in Italy in the fifteenth century and gradually spread northwards over the next two centuries. The visual forms of ancient buildings, sculpture, paintings and gardens were more and more accurately imitated as part of the effort to bring back to life the lost world of Greece and Rome - even for Christian church buildings - at a time when Orthodox Church art was turning away from such experiments in naturalism, and single-mindedly developing a contrasting ancient artistic and architectural tradition deriving from Hagia Sophia in Constantinople (see pp. 495-6).

Among the flood of new and strange material from the ancient world, which might or might not be valuable if put to use, was a set of writings about religion and philosophy purporting to have been written by a divine figure from ancient Egypt, Hermes Trismegistus. In fact they had been compiled in the first to third centuries CE, at much the same time as early Christianity was emerging. Some were then codified in Greek in a work now known as the
Corpus Hermeticum
, and others later translated into Latin and Arabic. Some dealt with forms of magic, medicine or astrology to sort out the problems of everyday life; some appealed to the same fascination with secret wisdom about the cosmos and the nature of knowledge which had created gnostic Christianity and later Manichaeism (see pp. 123-4 and 170-71). So this 'hermetic' literature chimed in with many traditional Christian preoccupations, and it became newly accessible after the 1480s when the Medici in Florence commissioned Marsilio Ficino to translate into Latin the available sections of the
Corpus Hermeticum
.
⁴³
Humanists savoured the cheery prospect that with more investigation, hard work and possibly supernatural aid, more ancient wisdom might be more fully recovered.

Equally exciting were the possibilities opened up by the increasing attention that Christian scholars paid to Cabbala, the body of Jewish literature which had started out as commentary on the Tanakh, but which by the medieval period had created its own intricate network of theological speculation, drawing on sub-Platonic mysticism like the gnostics or the hermeticists. Many humanists were gratified to find reinforcement for their own sense of infinite possibilities in humankind; Cabbala embraced a vision of humanity as potentially divine and indwelt by divine spirit. It was the hope of Ficino, or of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, the aristocratic translator of Cabbala, that cabbalistic and hermetic ideas together might complete God's purpose in the Christian message by broadening and enriching it. These themes were to play a great part in intellectual life and discussion throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, while also attracting derision and hostility from many theologians in both Catholic and Protestant camps. We will find that, in the end, they helped to bring the Reformation era to a close (see pp. 773-6).

How might one establish authenticity amid this intoxicating but unsorted flow of information? One criterion must be to assess a text in every respect: its content, date, origins, motives, even its appearance. So much depended on texts being accurate. This meant developing ways of telling a good text from a corrupt text: looking at the way in which it was written and whether it sounded like texts reliably datable to the same historical period. Historical authenticity gained a new importance: it now became the chief criterion for authority. The attitude which had once led holy men cheerfully to forge supposedly historical documents on a huge scale (see pp. 351-2) would no longer do. A 'source' (
fons
) for authority now outweighed the unchallenged reputation of an
auctorita
s, a voice of authority from the past.
Ad fontes,
back to the sources, was the battle-cry of the humanists, and Protestants took it over from them. An individual, equipped with the right intellectual skills, could outface even the greatest and most long-lasting authority in medieval Europe, the Church.

A particularly notorious example of a revered text demolished was the Donation of Constantine, that venerable forgery claiming to grant the fourth-century Pope Sylvester I sweeping powers throughout the Christian world. Unsurprisingly, one can still enjoy the Donation legend in the art of churches in Rome. There are, for instance, admirable but mendacious frescoes of the whole story decorating a chapel of St Sylvester in the centre of Rome beside the Church of Santi Quattro Coronati ('the Four Holy Crowned Ones'); these had been commissioned by a thirteenth-century pope whose quarrel with the Holy Roman Emperor had become especially fierce. Equally interesting, since it incidentally provides a reliable view of the interior of Old St Peter's Basilica, is the early-sixteenth-century representation of the moment of the Donation painted by Raphael and his assistants in the Vatican itself (see Plate 26). By the time that Julius II, that most imperious of popes, commissioned this egregious work of fiction, in the years immediately preceding Martin Luther's challenge to papal authority, the Donation had long been discredited. Scepticism about it was pioneered by a Dominican scholar in the late 1380s, and fifty years later swelled into a chorus, significantly from different scholars working independently: the future German Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa in 1432-3, the Italian Lorenzo Valla in 1440 and the English bishop Reginald Pecock in 1450.
⁴⁴
All concluded that the phraseology and vocabulary of the Donation were radically wrong for a fourth-century document, instantly demolishing a prop of papal authority.

Far from being 'New Learning', humanism represented a refocusing of old learning. It brought a new respect for sections of traditional scholarship of secondary importance in medieval universities: the non-theological parts of their arts curriculum, especially poetry, oratory and rhetoric. Humanists were lovers and connoisseurs of words. They saw them as containing power which, if used actively, could change human society for the better, and they were particularly concerned therefore to find the 'true' or original meaning of words. The words which inspired such excitement were found in ancient texts from long-vanished societies with the same belief in the transforming power of poetry, oratory and rhetoric: ancient Greece and Rome. Part of the project of transforming the world must be to get as clear as possible a picture of these ancient societies, and that meant getting the best possible version of the texts which were the main records of how those societies had thought and operated. Hence another possible definition of a humanist: he or she was an editor of texts - or an even cruder but still serviceable definition would be to say that it was someone who realized that there was more to life than the Middle Ages. And crucially for the future of Christianity, a humanist was someone whose cultural roots were in Western Latin culture, and who knew little of the Christianities of either the Chalcedonian or non-Chalcedonian East.