| #### 3. THE RETURN OF THE ANCIENT WORLD |

| #### #### The fifty years that followed the Council of Constance saw a remarkable revival in the fortunes of the papacy; in that time the popes managed to reassert everywhere the idea and the practice of their traditional primacy of jurisdiction over the universal Church. In that same half century, despite the continuous endeavours of the same popes, Christendom, as a political association, refused to league itself against the new militant Mohammedanism of the Ottomans; and at the very moment when Islam was about to be expelled from the last remnant of its ancient hold on Spain, it was yet able to gain in the south-east a greater hold on Christian Europeans than had ever been its fortune in the whole eight hundred years of its existence. But what is more generally associated with the history of these first two generations of the fifteenth century is that first rapid new flowering in Italy of literature and the arts, which, universally, is called the Renaissance. The effect of this on the fortunes of Catholicism was speedy, it was profound, and it has lasted. #### There is scarcely any need nowadays to labour the point that there were painters and sculptors of lasting significance before, let us say, Botticelli and Donatello, or that the Gothic is not sterile and barbarous; nor, on the other hand, is it necessary to insist how barren in creative literature was this new revival in its most enthusiastically classical stage. Nor, again, will it be any longer contended that the most splendid achievement of the thought of Greece was a closed book for the West until, in the fifteenth century, Chrysoloras and Gemistes Plethon began to teach the Greek grammar to the enthusiastic patricians of Florence. But although the nature of the change which then began was for long misunderstood, the scale of its effect has never been exaggerated. It brought about, ultimately, a change in the educated man's whole outlook upon life, a revolutionary change, which disturbed all his standards of judgment -- a change after which the Christian world was never to be, anywhere, quite the same kind of thing as before. #### It all began with a new interest in the Latin literature of the golden age, in Cicero above all and in Virgil; and this interest became a permanent enthusiasm, and indeed a main purpose of life, in the world of the cultured as, during the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, long forgotten works of these Latin poets, rhetoricians, philosophers and historians began to be "discovered" in the various monastic libraries of Italy, France and southern Germany. The second stage was the introduction to the West, now all aglow with the novelty of an artistic appreciation of literary form, of the still finer literature of the Greeks. It was in translations, first of all, that these masterpieces were read, translations made by the occasional Latin humanist of the new type who knew Greek. But presently the desire to read the actual texts bred a very passion to learn the language; and ability to read the Greeks themselves, once this became at all general, wrought such a revolution in the mind of the West that, for the next five hundred years, Greek studies would be everywhere considered not only the first foundation of all scholarship, but a vital necessity in the intellectual formation of the generally educated European. #### It has been urged that the Renaissance had no importance, in the fifteenth century, for the ordinary man, that it passed by the people of its own time. This is no doubt true; but it by no means passed by the ruling classes of the time, whether rulers in the Church or in the State, and it actually created a new class, destined to be as powerful as either of these, the independent thinkers, with no official attachments, who wrote for the general public of men who could read. Also, this new ruling class came into existence almost simultaneously with that new art of printing, one of whose main results was precisely this, that now, for the first time, the ordinary man could really make a contact with all the great literature of the world. And the invention permanently established the public influence of this new ruling class, making it forever impossible to set barriers to the spread and development of new ideas, whether these were good or bad, whether to popes and kings they were found convenient or inconvenient. #### Is it too much to say that the discovery of printing was the most important event of this century? Books had already been made, at the end of the fourteenth century, where each page was printed from a single block -- an adaptation of a Chinese invention already some hundreds of years old. But the all important idea was that of making separate types for each letter and to print by combining them in a frame. To whom was this due? The question is still much controverted. But, at a time when the idea was "in the air", it was the German, John Gutenberg (1398-1468) who first, successfully, began to print, at Mainz. The first piece we possess of his craftsmanship is an indulgence, dated 1454, and among his books are two magnificent bibles. Two of Gutenberg's associates, Fust and Schoeffer developed the new art. Bamberg, Strasburg, Augsburg and Nuremberg all had presses by 1470, and it was a printer at Cologne who taught the craft to the Englishman William Caxton, who set up his press at Westminster in 1476. The first Italian press was set up in 1464, very appropriately in the Benedictine abbey of Subiaco. Soon there was an abundance of printers in Italy, thirty-eight in Rome alone by the end of the century, and as many as a hundred in Venice. Printing came to France in 1470, where its first patrons were the king, Louis XI, and the theologians of the Sorbonne. #### Everywhere, indeed, the ecclesiastics welcomed the new invention, patronised the craftsmen and protected them against the strong opposition of the calligraphers, and of the booksellers too. The bishops in Germany, for example, considering the craft as a work of piety, granted indulgences to the printers and to those who sold the new books. Naturally enough, among the first to set up presses were the Brothers of the Common Life. Canons Regular, Benedictines, Premonstratensians, did the same. The first printer at Leipzig was a professor of theology in the university, and it was a Franciscan lector in theology who set up the first press in the university town of Tubingen. #### Such is the tale everywhere, cardinals, bishops, religious and clergy united in an immense practical enthusiasm to employ and develop the art. At Rome the pope who saw its beginnings -- Paul II (1464-1471) -- put at the disposal of the first printers the manuscripts collected by his predecessors. The generous zeal of Nicholas V now began to reap a harvest far beyond anything he could have hoped. Bessarion did as much for the presses of Venice, lending the printers his Greek manuscripts. The printers were held in high honour. Popes employed them as ambassadors, ennobled them. It was an art that the clergy were proud to exercise, and among these earliest printers there were, at Venice, even nuns. And when the navigators revealed to Europe the existence of the new lands beyond the Atlantic, it was the missionaries who took the printing press across the seas. #### The question must indeed rise immediately to the mind, how such a humanist movement as this -- the humanist movement par excellence, in popular impression -- affected the religion to which, for many centuries now, Western humanity had brought its mind in captivity; how did it affect, that is to say, not so much Catholicism as a body of truths, but as an association of human beings who accepted those truths? The Renaissance came upon this Catholic world at a moment when the Church was labouring under serious disintegrating strains, effects of the schism, of the long disputes about the papal primacy, and of the long decay of thought; in an age characterised by a general scepticism about the usefulness, or the possibility, of philosophy, an age when prelates who were the leaders of Catholic thought managed, in simple unawareness, to hold simultaneously the Catholic faith and philosophical positions incompatible with it, and this without interference, amid the time's general unawareness; and while, since Ockham, this practical scepticism had been slowly rotting the Christian mind, considerations of quite another order had been shaping the religious outlook of the new capitalist bourgeoisie, chafing at a morality which would limit its opportunities of profit. It was upon a Christendom "ready for anything" that there now came this movement which, inevitably, would not stop at any mere artistic appreciation of literary form. Almost from the beginning the movement effected important -- if as yet concealed -- apostasies from the Christian standard of morals. #### It was the greatest movement of the century, the greatest movement of the human spirit indeed, since that which began in the days of Abelard and John of Salisbury, and -- one of its most singular features -- among the chief patrons of the movement, and even among its leaders, were the popes. Not all of them, indeed, were enthusiasts, but hardly one was indifferent to it, and none of them set himself in direct opposition to it. #### What, it may be asked, had the popes to do with a movement that was not religious in its nature, nor yet in its immediate objective? where was their place in this new world of poets and painters and sculptors, of men of letters and artists generally? Here, surely, is the very antithesis to that conception of Christian perfection which inspired the contemporary Devotio Moderna? Rarely, indeed, in history has the papacy placed itself at the head of any contemporary new development, whether in thought or life; rarely has its role been that of the pioneer. In the earlier, medieval, renaissance -- a renaissance not of a particular way of writing, of thinking, or of life, but a rebirth of life itself, of the activity of the human mind after the quasi-death of the terrible Dark Ages -- the popes had scarcely initiated at all. They had been sometimes helpful, always watchful, and more often than not extremely suspicious. There are no philosopher popes in the formative stage of the century of St. Thomas and St. Bonaventure and Siger. But now, in the fifteenth century, popes are themselves among the most famous exponents of the new culture. The contrast could not be greater than between the attitude of Gregory IX to the Aristotelian revival in the first half of the century of St. Thomas, and that of Nicholas V in the morning of the Renaissance. The earlier pope, theologian and canonist, saw only the dangers -- really latent -- in the new rising cult of the Greek, but not the immense value of what was true in his thought, nor how the dangers it presented could be met. His successor, two hundred years later, saw only the glorious promise of a new age of Christian culture and wisdom; in an age already more superficial than any for five hundred years, it is not surprising that he mistook the signs, already evident, of an essential antagonism of ideals for the personal indecencies of a handful of looseliving men of letters. #### The earliest of the medieval popes whom we know as an interested and discerning patron of the fine arts on the grand scale, was Boniface VIII, and this was made a count against him in Philip the Fair's endeavour to bring about his posthumous condemnation as a heretic and a false pope. Boniface had, indeed, done much to assist the Roman art of his time, employing such masters as Pietro Cavallini and the Cosimati; and he had also brought to Rome, from Florence, Arnolfo di Cambio and Giotto. The record survives of the mass of precious church and altar furnishings, of vestments, episcopal jewellery, reliquaries, statues, work in metal and in ivory, tapestries and embroideries, made to the order of this pope by artists and craftsmen from every country in Europe. Boniface, in the last months before the fatal crisis of Anagni, also completed the organisation of the Roman university, by adding a faculty of arts to the existing faculties of the sacred sciences and law. He founded a second university at Fermo; he founded anew the archives of the Apostolic See, which had disappeared during the troubled years of the wars between his predecessors and Frederick II. Finally Boniface VIII collected what remained of the ancient library of the popes, works for the most part of theology, liturgy and canon law; and by his care to extend this collection he has a real claim to be a principal founder of the Vatican Library. Boniface VIII could find but a handful of manuscripts that had survived the storms and the years of chaos. He left behind no fewer than 1,300. Most of these were religious works, many of them newly transcribed for the pope, and illuminated by the staff of copyists he had formed. There were bibles and theology and philosophy, liturgy and law and church history; there were the Latin fathers and some of the Greeks too -- Origen at any rate, St. Athanasius and St. John Chrysostom. But there were also -- and it is this which interests this chapter -- manuscripts of Cicero and Seneca, Virgil and Ovid, Lucan, Suetonius and Pliny, the grammatical treatises of Donatus and thirty-three works in Greek, the earliest collection of Greek texts we know of in any medieval library, and works, all of them, of a scientific kind, Euclid, Ptolemy, Archimedes. #### Boniface VIII died in 1303, his immediate successor reigned only a short nine months, and Clement V who next succeeded, the first of the Avignon popes, had not ever, until the close of his reign, any settled place of residence. Not until the coming of John XXII (1316-1334) were the popes again in a position to interest themselves in literature and the arts. It was this pope, and his successor, Benedict XII (1334-1342), the main organisers of the Avignon papacy as a system of government, who provided so magnificently for its housing in the great Palais des Papes that still dominates the ancient city by the Rhone. From this time Avignon became a centre to which architects, painters and sculptors and the whole world of craftsmen and artificers, flowed steadily in search of patronage; and with them came the men of letters, the most notable of all being Francesco Petrarch. While Rome, intellectually and materially, fell back into a very barbarism, Avignon, in these central years, of the fourteenth century, bade fair to become what Florence was a hundred years later. #### The papal library was developed anew, and yet again there figured among its treasures what Latin classics the medieval world possessed -- no Horace as yet, nor anything of Tacitus -- and new translations from the Greek, of Aristotle, for example, and Aesop and Porphyry. But there is no Homer, no Demosthenes, no Thucydides, and no Greek tragedy. Yet although the Greek influence is still exercised in so limited a way, and through translations only, the fourteenth century is a time when contact with the Greek-speaking world is being steadily extended. The rapidly developing crisis of the Christian East, as the Ottomans advance, brings more and more Greeks to the West, in search of assistance or simply as refugees, and with both kinds of necessitous Greeks the papal court, in all these years, is very familiar. Gradually a practical knowledge of fourteenth-century Greek becomes more common at the curia and, through the curia, elsewhere too. The new religious discussions between Latins and Greeks also, inevitably, turn the mind of the West not only to the less familiar of the Greek fathers but to the original texts of all of them. In this new interest the pioneers are the Dominicans and the Franciscans -- the Franciscans especially -- whom, for more than a hundred years now, the popes have been employing as missionaries and agents in the islands of the Greek sea, in Asia Minor, in the very lands of central Asia as far as China itself. [ ] As the diplomacy rises and falls between the popes and these Eastern princes, presents are exchanged, and among the presents from the East there are manuscripts of the Greek classics. #### It is this world into which Petrarch was introduced, a young man in his twenties, about the year 1330. Here, at the papal court, he found patrons, protection, books, and the stimulus of new opportunities, rewards, a career, the means to form his own famous library, and his first Greek. And after this, a first practical fruit of the ancient literature's hold on him, came his interest in the other remains of the ancient culture, the beginnings of all that practical historical and artistic interest in the sculpture and architecture of Greece and Rome. Petrarch, it was said long ago, is "the first modern man." Others have also been put forward for the distinction, but there is much in Petrarch which is new, and which since Petrarch has become characteristic and typical. We can see in him all the main elements of the promise which the Renaissance seemed to offer to the Christian future, and something also of what it was that blighted that promise. Recalling his career, and the development of his spirit, we can better understand the unmisgiving way in which such an admirable Christian as Nicholas V welcomed the movement with open arms and without any reservations. Petrarch is the "modern man" in his violent reaction against the cultural achievement of the medieval world. Here he is a pioneer and, given his genius, his effect is weighty indeed. He has, for example, nothing but scorn for the unclassical latinity of the Middle Ages. He mocks the time for its dependence on translations; Aristotle would not recognise himself in his thirteenth-century Latin disguise. And he mocks at the cult of Aristotle himself. He is impatient with the superstition that entangles the learning of the Middle Ages, the bogus sciences of astrology and alchemy, the charlatanry that often passes for medicine; and he is impatient with the new lawyers' religion of the civil law, which they so eagerly develop, with a jargon of its own and distinctions for the sake of distinguishing, into a new and profitable pedantic superstition. #### In Petrarch we also note, for the first time in a personage of international importance, the study of ancient history passing into such a love of the ancient world therein portrayed that the restoration of that world is urged as a practical solution for present discontents. Here is a first crusader driven by that nostalgie du passe which has afflicted so many others ever since. Rome, the Rome of Cicero, is the golden age; all since is usurpation and decay. So fourteen hundred years of history must, somehow, be undone. Whence the crazy-seeming alliance of Petrarch with Rienzi; whence the new Ghibellinism in which Petrarch tries, with all the power of flattery at his command, to enlist the realist princes to restore the Roman State; whence also the new anti-papal spirit, for the fact and presence of the papacy in Rome is the great obstacle to any real restoration of the republic. Here are ideas and ideals which, once given to the world, will not die. They inspire very many of the humanists -- and conspirators -- of the next generation, and Machiavelli will give them a still greater vitality, and thence they come down to our own age. Who will be so bold as to say we have yet heard the last of them? #### Petrarch was a poet and a man of letters, and only incidentally was he a thinker or politician -- these activities were but the overbrimming of his literary contemplation. But in one respect he makes an interesting contact of accord with the world of some contemporaries whom he never met, and with whom doubtless he would not have recognised that he had anything in common. For Petrarch was not anti-Aristotelian simply because, on crucial questions, he preferred the teaching of other philosophers, but because, fundamentally, he thought all such speculative philosophy a vain waste of time. Happiness is the object of life, thought cannot guide man to it, for in thought there is no certainty, and if a man wants to know how to be happy, let him read the Gospels -- or Cicero. Not, indeed, because Cicero is a thinker-another Aristotle -- but because Cicero is himself an apostle. Aristotle is cold, but Cicero is on fire with love of virtue and will enflame all those who read him. Not thought then but eloquence, not the philosopher but the artist, is the safe guide. Petrarch is yet another man who, sceptical about the power of reason, seeks elsewhere than in his reason the assurance he needs. And, as often happens when good men shrink from the labour of thought about their religious life, he assembles a strangely assorted company to aid him, and finds a curiously unchristian ratio for their union, and offers us Cicero and the divine Gospel as joint warranty for a Christian life, twin guardian angels for man cast into a world of temptation. #### Petrarch, of course, knew that world as well as any other man. His sensitive spirit had been tried there as only such can be tried, and he had suffered defeats and perhaps routs. But the religious foundation remained secure. One day Petrarch was converted, and thenceforward he did battle manfully and continuously and, one may say, systematically with the tempter. Two traits, however, very notably, survived that conversion, to be a main source of anxiety with him to the end. They need to be mentioned explicitly, for they are to be the outstanding characteristics of almost all the great men of the Renaissance, though with these they are not defects, but rather the main end of life and the natural, hardly to be regarded, effect of their pursuit of it. Those traits are the desire for fame, and vanity. In Petrarch we find the earliest signs of that mania to be famous which is the leading note in the life of public men of all sorts during the last fifty years of which this book treats. No cult could be less compatible with the Christian ideal. #### Petrarch, although he is hardly more than a precursor of the Renaissance as the term is generally used, is yet, as poet and man of letters, and as a man, a far greater personage than any of those who follow him in the more brilliant Italy of the next [ ]. century. Before we speak of these lesser men -- who by the accident of their special scholarship were necessarily the artificers of the greatest change of all -- and as a kind of preface to the statement of the effect of their lives on the last generations of medieval Catholicism, we need to note that Petrarch was not by any means the only Italian whose genius these French popes fostered at their court of Avignon. It is at Avignon that the popes first begin to employ the new humanists as their secretaries. The new age is not yet arrived when to write Ciceronian prose is the best of titles to a prince's favour, and a rapid highroad to wealth; but it is fast approaching. The last three of the Avignon popes -- Innocent VI, B. Urban V, Gregory XI -- were all men of culture, all university types, the first two indeed one-time professors. Innocent VI and Urban V brought to the service of the chancery the famous Coluccio Salutati, who later was to pass into the service of Florence as its chancellor and there to sponsor the entry into life and letters of "the heavenly twins" of the new age, Leonardo Bruni (called Aretino) and Poggio Bracciolini, and to bring to Florence the most active cultural force of all this time, the Byzantine Manuel Chrysolorus from whom Poggio, and Cenci, Filelfo himself, Ambrogio Traversari, and Thomas of Sarzana who was to become Pope Nicholas V, all learned their Greek. And it was Gregory XI's employment of Francesco Bruni that led to the appearance of his nephew Aretino in the papal chancery, and so to the beginning of all that development which made the corps of papal secretaries one of the first and most important centres of the classical revival in fifteenth- century Italy, a centre from which almost everything else was to come. #### This is not a history of that revival, but the story cannot be told of the effect of the revival upon the papacy, and upon the papacy's government of the universal Church, without some mention of the famous humanists whom, from about this time, the popes began to call into their service, nor without some reminder of what that scholarship was which made these "civil servants" so famous. The chief of them, Poggio Bracciolini, entered the service of the popes, as a young man in his early twenties, about 1403. He served them for fifty years, rising to be the chief official of the chancery and amassing a huge fortune. In 1414 Poggio made one of the suite of John XXIII at the Council of Constance. For the debates there was presently great want of theological and patristic texts, and it was Poggio's task to organise the collection of needed manuscripts from the libraries of the monasteries of Switzerland and southern Germany. Along with the fathers he found in these libraries much else; a host of minor writers of the silver age of Latin letters, the histories of Ammianus Marcellinus, for example, Quintilian's Institutes and several long-forgotten speeches of Cicero. From this moment Poggio was a celebrity. Martin V was glad to retain him in the chancery as he reorganised it in 1418. Some few years later it was Poggio's good fortune to discover Petronius and Pliny and Tacitus. This man of letters was no less interested in what we have come to call antiques, and he was one of the first collectors of medals, coins, marbles, statues and other relics of the art of the ancient world. His museum was indeed celebrated, and the missionaries in the East were encouraged to contribute to it, for presents of this kind were the surest passport to Poggio's influence in the curia. #### Among Poggio's colleagues in the offices of the chancery there were three other scholars of note, who shared in the hunt after the lost classics and who were also poets, Bartholomew Aragazzi, Agapito Cenci and Antonio Loschi. All three were already in the service of the curia by the time of Martin V's election (1417), and they remained in it for the rest of their lives. They are the first editors and commentators of the Latin classics, practitioners of the new art of writing Ciceronian prose, and they were brought into the papal service so that the state-papers -- bulls and the like -- might be drafted in a style worthy of the Roman See. Never did this somewhat pedantic occupation seem so marvellous an accomplishment; and never, before or since, was it so munificently rewarded. [ ] #### The leading cardinals of the time followed the example set by the popes. It was Louis Aleman -- whom we have seen in set opposition to the papacy at Basel -- who was even able, when legate at Bologna, to win to the papal service, for a few brief months, the most famous of all Italian teachers of Greek, Filelfo. The Bishop of Bologna at that same time, the Carthusian cardinal Nicholas Albergati, was also a generous and interested patron of the new fashions. In his palace Filelfo was welcomed and he found there, among those eager to learn from him, the two future popes, Thomas of Sarzana, now beginning as the master of the cardinal’s household a twenty years' apprenticeship to the business of effectively patronising art and letters, and Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini. A third patron in the Sacred College who, like Albergati, was known universally for the piety and austerity of his life, was the youthful Domenico Capranica. A fourth, very notable, figure was the wealthy Girolamo Orsini, who gave all his energies and his money to gather a great library which, like the papal collection, should be at the disposal of all who loved studies. It was due to the combination of Poggio and Girolamo Orsini that the long-lost comedies of Plautus were given back to the world, and another effect of the revival is to be seen in the cardinal’s no less momentous recovery of the works of St. Cyprian. #### What first brought the popes of the fifteenth century into contact with the Renaissance was the most practical reason of all. The immediate task before these popes was to reorganise the machinery of government, and to rebuild the ruined churches and palaces and offices of their capital. They needed Latinists, and they needed architects, and painters and sculptors; and in each department they strove to gain the services of the best With Martin V bringing to Rome Gentili and Masaccio and Ghiberti, that historic association of popes and artists begins that is, in the minds of all, one of the most permanent memories of the next hundred and fifty years; the association that reaches its peak in the collaboration of the two gigantic figures of Julius II and Michelangelo. Eugene IV's long reign was too broken for him to bring to a finish Martin V's great work of restoration. Of the work done by Eugene's orders in St. Peter's, only Filarete's great doors remain. The chapel in the Vatican, to decorate which this pope brought Fra Angelico from Florence, has disappeared, and there disappeared too, in the time of Paul III, (1534-1549), the frescoes painted for Eugene IV by Benozzo Gozzoli. #### Eugene IV was, to the end of his days, a most observant religious, [ ] but neither by temperament nor training was he a man of letters or an artist. Nevertheless he too had learned Greek, and he was a great reader and student, especially of histories. His real interest in the new scholarship is shown unmistakably in his active patronage of one of the most winning figures of the time, the Camaldolese monk Ambrogio Traversari. This truly saintly man had learnt his Greek, when prior of his monastery in Florence, from Filelfo; and from his cell in that austere cloister, through conversations, and through a most extensive correspondence, he exercised a very real influence on the movement, proposing and executing translations from the Greek and joining in the quest for still more manuscripts. Eugene IV made Traversari, in 1431, General of his order. In 1435 he sent him to Basel as legate, in a critical moment of the council’s proceedings, and the combination of learning, letters and perfect charity that was Ambrogio Traversari worked wonders with the touchy assembly. It was Traversari, again, whom the same pope sent as his legate to Venice in 1438 to receive the Greek emperor and the delegation that had come for the reunion council. In the council he played the chief part on the Latin side, and living long enough to see the reunion a fact, he died just a few weeks later felix opportunitate mortis (October 20, 1439). But none of these public employments really interrupted the main interest of Traversari's life. He translated, at Eugene's request, the lives of the Greek Fathers, the Greek acts of the Council of Chalcedon, and he undertook also a new translation of the Bible. #### Another evidence of this same pope's interest in the new scholarship, for the services this might be expected to render to the study of Sacred Scripture, is Eugene IV's lifelong patronage of Cyriac of Ancona, [ ] a great traveller in the Greek East, a scholar and a practical archaeologist also. Eugene had first met Cyriac when, Cardinal Legate of the Marches, he had employed him to remodel the harbour of Ancona. From the East Cyriac brought back to the pope new manuscripts of the Greek Testament, and he was commissioned to compare these texts with the Vulgate translation; one of the first instances of the application of the new methods to scriptural studies. Cyriac was also a pioneer when he compiled the first collection of classical inscriptions. #### Cyriac of Ancona is thus one of the earliest of archaeological writers. But still more celebrated, the very "Father of Archaeology," was Flavio Biondo of Forli (1388-1463), yet another of the college of papal secretaries, recruited for the service of the Holy See by Eugene himself in 1434. For the remaining twenty-nine years of his life Biondo remained in that service, studying actualities and composing the works which, after five hundred years, have by no means lost their value, and continue in daily use; namely the history of his own time, and the two great works Roma Instaurata and Italia Illustrata which are a skilled and detailed inventory of what still remained of the architecture and sculpture of the ancient world. No writings had a more speedy, or more lasting, effect in extending the general interest of that century in all the aims of the Renaissance. #### The name of Tommaso Parentucelli -- more generally styled Thomas of Sarzana -- has already come into this story as a papal diplomatist and as one of the innermost circle of the leaders of the new movement. So late as 1444 he was still no more than the majordomo of the Cardinal Albergati. But when that saintly Carthusian -- for such he assuredly was -- died in that year, Eugene IV named Parentucelli to succeed him as Bishop of Bologna. In December 1446 the same pope gave him the red hat, and then, only ten weeks later, Tommaso was elected pope. There seemed something all but miraculous about such a speedy exaltation of a man, still on the young side of fifty, from the utmost obscurity in the ecclesiastical world to the very summit In memory of his old master, the new pope took the name Nicholas, and in Nicholas V, so all historians have agreed to say, the Renaissance in all its unspoiled freshness was truly enthroned as pope. Here were combined, in fact, high technical competence, impeccable taste, limitless enthusiasm, magnanimity and magnificence in their only true sense, religious scholarship, deep sincere piety and humility of soul, and a disinterestedness from all thought of self not to be seen again in that chair for seventy years, [ ] and never again to be seen there allied with such a splendour of natural gifts. #### But how far did Nicholas V, as pope, understand the realities of his time? the real condition of religion, the real nature of its weaknesses where it was weak, the causes of the weaknesses, and which weaknesses were heaviest with menace and even with mortality? To his immediate successor, the Aragonese crusader-pope Calixtus III, much of Nicholas V's programme was, apparently, little better than aesthetic trifling; and the next humanist pope, Aeneas Sylvius himself, made little secret of his belief, barely three years after Nicholas' death, that there were more urgent tasks before the papacy than the advancement of scholarship and belles lettres and the arts, even for what service these might bring to religion. We can, of course, hardly dismiss from our minds, as we regard the splendid schemes of Nicholas V, our knowledge of what the years that followed his reign were to bring, but if it is with a kind of reservation that we con the tale of his magnificent ideals, and of those vast achievements of his all too short and prematurely ended reign, we must remember also that to nothing were the later disasters due more, than to papal and episcopal neglect to foster ecclesiastical learning, and to make this truly effective by marrying it to all that was best in the intellectual life of the time. What the next fifty years needed was a succession of popes in whom the spirit of Nicholas V was active. #### It has been a commonplace with the historians since the very reign of Nicholas V that, in him, the Renaissance itself was enthroned as pope. But true though this is, in one respect he was not a Renaissance type at all, as the term has come to be understood. For to Tommaso Parentucelli the central ultimate purpose of the passionately desired perfection in letters and the arts had never been the perfection of man, but the clearer manifestation of the glory of man's Creator. And this continued to be, no less certainly, the guiding principle of his immense humanistic activities as Pope Nicholas V. #### To his brilliant constructive genius the chronic civil disorder of the Papal State was a challenge not to be ignored. A whole scheme, or rather series of schemes, sprang from his mind for the restoration of decayed towns, of bridges, of roads, of schools and universities, and for the establishment of permanent harmony between the fierce local patriotisms and the central Roman authority, between the patricians and the bourgeoisie, between the nobles and their papal ruler. And a most unlikely number of the schemes were carried through. No pope had ever built so much before. Nicholas did not indeed live to realise his dream of making the capital of the Christian religion the active chief centre and source of culture, too, for the whole Christian world; but it was he who finally swept away all the accumulated debris and patchwork restoration that remained from the disastrous Avignon century, and who crowned the tentative endeavours of the previous twenty-five years with an effective restoration on the grand scale. The walls of Rome in their whole circuit were rebuilt and strengthened, the great aqueduct of the Acqua Vergine was repaired and a beginning made thereby of a new era in the health of the city. Four of the bridges on the main roads out of Rome -- the Ponte Milvio, Ponte Nomentano, Ponte Salario, and Ponte Lucano -- were restored and fortified. The Capitol, too, rose up again from its ruins, and a good dozen of the ruined churches were rebuilt, while great works of restoration were carried through at the basilicas of St. Mary Major, St. Paul-without-the-walls, the Twelve Apostles and St. Lorenzo. It is again to Nicholas V that the oldest part of the Vatican as modern times know it goes back; it is, indeed, from this pope's time that the palace begins to have that importance in the story of the popes which has ended in its name being almost synonymous with the papacy itself. In the plans of Nicholas V for the rebuilding of the Leonine city we see his creative genius at its greatest. [ ] These plans involved the most sacred shrine in Rome, the great basilica built by Constantine over the tomb of St. Peter. After a thousand years of wear and tear the fabric was, indeed, in a parlous state, the main south wall leaning outwards from the perpendicular as much as five feet, and the north wall pulled inward to the same degree. At first the pope thought only of rebuilding the choir, and the walls of the new choir had gone up as high as fifty feet when the views of the Leonardo of the day, Leon Battista Alberti, [ ] induced Nicholas to consent to the extremely drastic remedy of pulling the great church down and building something entirely new in its place. But the pope died before anything more had been achieved than a little preliminary destruction, and it was not until the time of Julius II, fifty years later, that the transformation was really put in hand. #### Rome was, indeed, during the eight years reign of Nicholas V, one huge building yard, a workshop, a studio. But outside the capital city the pope was no less active. At Orvieto, Spoleto, Viterbo, Fabriano, Assisi, Civita Castellana, Civita Vecchia, Narni, Gualdo and Castelnuovo, public buildings of all kinds, and public works, were planned on a generous scale and undertaken and carried through. The pope's great aim was to end the misery of the long baronial wars which made central Italy one of the least safe places in Christendom. His diplomacy, and his frequent visits to the provincial cities, did much to end these feuds, and his "Bloodless restoration of peace and order to the State of the Church", is indeed one of his chief glories. Particularly important was his reduction of the chronic insubordination of Bologna, in many ways the most important city in the pope's domains. Nicholas V is perhaps the most celebrated of the many great men who have passed from the spiritual rule of Bologna to the Roman See. [ ] He had spent twenty-five years of his life there as priest and bishop, and he now won the city over by a kindliness, and a willingness to concede, that were new in the history of Bologna's papal rulers. #### The details of the history of the popes as rulers of their Italian principality are perhaps no great concern of the history of the Church, except in so far as their political activity and its attendant cares influenced the general fortunes of religion. But Nicholas V's policies were of such rare generosity, his achievements were on such a scale and so characteristic, both of his own constructive genius and of the new vitality of the great movement with which he is associated, that they could not go unmentioned. Nevertheless, all this activity of what we would call town-planning, of restoration and new building, this extensive employment of architects and builders, of sculptors and painters, of goldsmiths and jewellers and weavers of precious stuffs, was the less important part of the pope's great and lasting influence on the development of the European mind. #### Nicholas was primarily a scholar -- an erudit, to be still more precise; the great passion of his life was books and the multiplication of other book lovers. The essential verse in the epitaph which Aeneas Sylvius wrote for him [ ] is surely Excoluit doctos doctior ipse viros. His mission was that of Albert the Great two hundred years earlier: "To make all these things understandable to the Latins"; "these things" being, now, not the ideas of Aristotle but the beauty and strength of Greek literature. "The Renaissance until now had been Latin, henceforward it was Greek," a modern scholar has said, with pardonably warm exaggeration. But to no scholars, indeed, was Nicholas V so liberal -- and his liberality to all of them knew scarcely any bounds -- as to those who knew Greek. As he planned a new cite vaticane where popes and cardinals and ambassadors and scholars and monks should live, and the central activity of the Church turn for ever in a setting worthy of its sublime ends, so the pope also planned a new Latin literature, the translation of the literature of Greece wrought by the masters of the new Latin prose and verse. #### For Nicholas V, then, Valla translated Thucydides and Herodotus; Poggio and Lapo di Castiglione undertook Xenophon; the corpus of Aristotle was divided among a half-dozen "best wits", Bessarion doing the Metaphysics, and George of Trebizond (alas ! for he was more interested in pay than in accuracy, or indeed in good work at all), the Rhetoric and the Ethics; Plato's Republic too, was in the list and the Laws, and Philo Judaeus also. Polybius, one of the pope's favourite authors, went to Perotti, who also produced a wonderful version of Strabo that for a hundred years or more obscured the original. But the greatest desire of Nicholas was never to be realised, the translation of Homer into Latin hexameters. For this he was prepared to pay no less than 10,000 gold pieces. First of all he prevailed on Carlo Marsuppini -- then acting as secretary to the Florentine Republic -- to undertake it; and when he died, in 1453, Filelfo took up the task. But Nicholas was dead before Filelfo had really begun his work. These were but literature and philosophy. Nicholas also arranged for translations of the Greek Fathers, of St. Basil, of the two Gregories, of Nazianzen and Nyssa, of St. Cyril and St. John Chrysostom and also of Eusebius of Cesarea. Finally, he commissioned Gianozzo Manetti, the pupil of Ambrogio Traversari, and a leading personage in the great world of Florence for years until he fell foul of the rising Medici, to re-translate the Bible. Manetti [ ] knew Hebrew as well as Greek, and his Old Testament was to appear in three parallel columns, his own translation, the Septuagint and the Latin of St. Jerome's Vulgate. #### But Nicholas V's time was short -- far shorter than the rejoicing humanists could have guessed when their fellow, at forty- nine years of age, was elected pope in 1447. In 1450 he was already so ill that his life was despaired of; in the first months of 1451 he was ill again, and from this time indeed, never really well, and alas, utterly changed in disposition, nervous and apprehensive and reserved, where he had been all his life the friend of all the world. He was ill again in 1453, and for the last eighteen months of his life (he died on March 25, 1455), he scarcely ever left his bed. "Thomas of Sarzana saw more friends in a day," he said to his Carthusian friends who were preparing him for death, "than Nicholas V sees in a year." It was a sad ending to such bright promise, and yet it was said of his saintly passing, "No pope in the memory of man has died like this." Not all the detail was realised of what the great pope had planned, but the fundamental things remained, and above all the great fact that the papacy -- an infinitely greater force than all the cultural courts and coteries of the day -- had taken up and blessed the new movement and, as it were, made it for a moment its own work. This certainly lasted, and it was the personal work of Nicholas V. #### With the passing of this pope there comes a time of flatness in the Renaissance story. Not even Aeneas Sylvius -- Pope Pius II -- is his heir, nor the cultured Venetian, Paul II, who next succeeds, but, of all men the least likely, the Franciscan theologian Sixtus IV, elected pope in 1471. And by that date -- sixteen years after the death of Nicholas -- many tendencies had developed which in his time were but in germ. For there is another side to the story of all this splendour of scholarship and poetry and art. It is time to consider how the return of the ancient world affected other things in the artist besides his mastery of technique, to say something of those Renaissance ideas, which. from now on, acted most powerfully against what still remained of the medieval synthesis of natural and revealed knowledge, against what remained of medieval theology's prestige, against the educated man's appreciation of the prestige of Christianity itself, and against the traditional Christian scheme of virtuous living. #### We should perhaps not be far wrong if, attempting the impossibility of summary description, we said that the Renaissance was the effect upon the men of the fifteenth century of their rediscovery of classical culture in all its fullness; and that what men found most novel and most characteristic in that culture, and most congenial, was its perfection of form. New respect and enthusiasm for the newly discovered perfection of form, and a new ambition to realise the like perfection, are perhaps what chiefly differentiates the men of the Renaissance from their medieval forerunners. Classical antiquity is, for them, the age of perfection; the golden age, of life no less than of art. Life, as that perfect thing the literature of the Greeks has revealed it, is for them the proper study of mankind; and it is now that there is born that prejudice of the superiority of the classical culture over the Christian which even yet, amongst educated men, is far from extinct. This new cult was all the more easily triumphant because it came upon the educated world in a moment when this lacked an object adequate to its needs. Not only, at the opening of the fifteenth century, was there no such figure as Dante, a spirit nourished by the philosophy and theology of the schools, but the philosophy of the schools had by now all but vanished from the ken of the liberally educated; it was now scarcely more than a preoccupation of the new scientists in their disputes with the professionals of the old university world. The influence of the characteristically medieval thought upon its own world had been steadily declining for years; the reappearance of Greece had, for the liberally educated world, the effect upon that thought of a coup de grace. All who know no Greek are now as nothing, and by Greek is meant the literature of the Greeks as literature and, above all, Plato. #### Here again, in recent years, the specialists in the matter warn us that we must be ready to revise old judgments, as we endeavour to understand what kind of thing that re-appearance of the Greek texts of Plato is, in western Europe of the fifteenth century. Not only, they tell us, was Plato not unknown in the Middle Ages, but medieval Platonism was not mere neo-Platonism. There did exist in the Middle Ages an active direct tradition of Platonic doctrine. But what a wealth of difference there lies between devotion to such a tradition, and devotion fed with the newly-revealed texts of the master himself ! Once these were available the cultured world "went Platonic" in a generation or so -- and very consciously it went anti-Aristotelian -- and Platonic it has remained, consciously and unconsciously, almost ever since. How should this be important to Catholicism? Very evidently, in this way at least, that the official theology of the Church, for now nearly two centuries, had been bound up with many of Aristotle's logical and philosophical doctrines and with his methods. And now, for Aristotle, already defeated in the field of physics, and his supremacy threatened by the Nominalist denial of the possibility of metaphysics, there was to be substituted, as the ideal, his own vastly more attractive master. If Plato reigned instead of Aristotle, what would become of the old theology's hold -- none too secure already -- upon the mind of the educated? True enough, St. Thomas Aquinas, who had somewhat tamed Aristotle to the Christian yoke, was not the first in time of Catholic theologians. Stretching back for a thousand years before St. Thomas there was the long line of the Fathers, and these were Platonists all. And the greatest of the Latin Fathers, St. Augustine, was not only Platonist, but was indeed the main channel through which -- down to the discoveries of the fifteenth century -- knowledge of Plato had come to western Europe. Whence the natural result of a reaction towards the Fathers, producing theologians who would like to ignore the Scholastic Theology, about which, also, (to the new sensitiveness of this literary generation) there clung something of Aristotle's own grimness of speech. #### But damaging as this new indifference, and even hostility, of the new theologian was to the hold of Scholastic Theology, the new cult of Plato wrought also a harm that was positive. For thinkers who were Christians, Plato had always had this first attractiveness that here was philosophic recognition of the existence of a nonmaterial order of reality, and of its superiority to the material order; there was recognition that there existed an order of reality accessible only to the intelligence, and superior to that other order of reality with which the senses are occupied, the model indeed and the archetype of this lower order. In practice, here was a philosophy teaching that the things of earth are inferior, and that man's only happiness lies elsewhere, in his contact with that superior world and with the divine; here were theories to explain the divine nature, the kind of thing man's soul is and his mind, the way man's mind works, and the way man can attain to wisdom which is the condition sine qua non of his true happiness. Plato's temperament, it has been said, is essentially religious and ethical, and the religious (and specifically the theistic) interpretation of the universe is the chief historical legacy of his philosophy to subsequent ages. And it was as "a fusion of the rational-mathematical, the aesthetic and the religious elements in the contemplation of the universe. . . [a] glorification of the cosmos" that Plato appeared to the men who so eagerly gave themselves to him in the fifteenth century. [ ] #### How would these new disciples of the philosopher whom all styled " the divine ", accommodate their discovery with the Catholic faith in which they had been bred? Would that faith remain as the guide of life, or could not a man find all that he needed in Plato? It was, all over again, the trouble that had tormented the Christian mind when, two hundred years before, the corpus of Aristotle's thought had first been laid before it. In Plato, so Marsiglio Ficino, one of the finest flowers of the new age, was to say "there are set forth all the directives for life, all the principles of nature, all the holy mysteries of things divine." [ ] And again, "Plato. . . shows himself everywhere as much a religious man as a philosopher, a subtle disputant, and a holy priest, a fecund orator. For which reasons, if you will continue as you have begun, to follow further in the footsteps of the divine Plato, you will -- God guiding you -- find happiness, and this especially because Plato, along with the philosophy of the Pythagoreans and Socrates, follows the law of Moses and is a precursor of the law of Christ." [ ] #### Marsiglio Ficino was the protege of Cosimo de' Medici, and the very foundation of that Academy of Florence which was the chief shrine of the new Platonic studies. When his old patron lay dying, in 1464, Marsiglio (not yet a priest) came to his assistance. Cosimo had earlier written bidding him bring his promised translation of Plato, " For I desire nothing more ardently than to learn that way which most easily leads man to happiness." As Cosimo lay in his last illness he made his confession and received the last sacraments. With Marsiglio he spoke much of Plato, and Plato was read to the dying man. He spoke too of the miseries of earthly life and of the contempt for it which a man should have who aspired to higher happiness, and Marsiglio reminded him how "Xenocrates that holy man, the beloved disciple of Plato," had set forth these things in his treatise on death. The story is a curious melange of Catholicism and Platonism, with Catholicism, surely, already suffering from the alliance. [ ] #### Nor did Plato come to the age unaccompanied. Only a pace behind, in his very shadow, and not always distinguished from him, came Plotinus and the religious cult of Neo-Platonism which had developed through Plotinus. [ ] Here was Platonism presented as a religion, where communion with the divine through ecstasy, for which lifelong asceticism prepared the soul, was presented as the supreme achievement of life. It was a "religion" where there was no place for real freedom, nor for personal responsibility, nor prayer, and where sin had no meaning. The world, for the Neo-Platonist was not created by the free act of a loving creator, but was the necessary expression of the nature of the first principle of all. Providence was but the kind of universal sympathy that links all things together in a fixed necessitated movement, all being moved by the single soul of the world. Here, in ultimate logic, is Pantheism and all its horrors; religion without a personal God, without any possibility of the Incarnation, mystical life without any need of grace and -- since there is no such distinction as between creator and created -- communion without subordination, and the idea that mystical experience is the basis and the test of truth. #### Many things in Platonism and in Neo-Platonism can no doubt be given a Christian interpretation, but of themselves they are not Christian; for Christians with intelligences less than very well trained in Christian teaching, they are obviously dangerous. #### But it was not only Platonism -- in its purer and in its baser forms -- that came to life again in the West as a force in men's lives. Stoicism also revived; and Epicureanism. Once more man is invited to the belief in the perfectibility of his nature, and to accept the doctrine of his own goodness. To the Christian doctrine of the fall and its effects on human nature, of all men's need of healing grace, there is opposed the new, more elegantly stated, cult of man as he is, meditations on a way of life unfettered by sobering thoughts of man as he ought to be. The new man is to be made perfect by the full freedom to indulge his every impulse, to satisfy his every desire; for this alone is life. Man is simply an animal endowed with the power to think, master of his fate indeed, sole captain of his soul, to whom all that is possible is lawful. Never before was the " natural " so attractively portrayed to the Christian world as good and perfectible. [ ] #### And the artists re-echoed the philosophic teaching. "Such a feeling for nature in spring time," says a French critic of Lippo Lippi's "Adoration of the Shepherds," (painted about 1430) "as veracious in representation as it is intense in perception, had never before charmed the eye." Here, too, the primacy of nature begins to triumph, as the mysteries of the beauty of the human form are more and more lovingly explored. "Men had discovered that, outside Christianity altogether, there existed a culture, an art that was not only infinite in its riches, but which was also essentially natural, the spontaneous fruit of man's own faculties wherein was no element of dogma or revelation. And it SO happened that these products had, as things of beauty, an overwhelming superiority over all others. . . . The Christian centuries, from this point of view, seemed, -- indeed, a time of repression and of barbarism." [ ] Beauty -- it had, indeed, never been lacking to medieval man; but for the first time there was now revealed to his meditative gaze, and in what formidable competition with Christianity, the long lost beauty of that pagan world over which Christianity had once -- and it seemed finally -- been triumphant. Here, again, there was a system and a formula that were complete, a whole philosophy of nature and of life: here was most potent matter for the revolt of revolts against the authority of Christianity, and that in an age already in revolt against the personnel of the Christian Church. The revival of interest in classical letters was showing itself, by the middle of the fifteenth century, as but a step in the quest for other ideals of thought and life. #### And with the new cult of the natural, following upon the new proclamation of the primacy of Nature, there began the new attack on what chiefly stood between it and success, the spiritual and moral teaching of the Church. It was now that there began, not attacks upon the clergy for their vices, but attacks upon the monks for the "folly" of their ascetic ideals, and -- another new feature -- the literary glorification of vice. Morals begin, in every city and court of Italy, their gadarene descent, and among the most notorious of these ill-living antagonists of Christian ideals are the humanists of the Curia Romana. Nowhere did the new worship of antiquity produce greater contempt and hatred for the culture and the religion inspired by other sources, than in this circle. Poggio made the sins of priests and religious the butt of his filthy Facetiae and in his work on Avarice he mocked the very spiritual ideals that should have prevented sin. Valla, author of the De Voluptate, made an open attack on the ideal of chastity declaring that prostitutes were more useful to mankind than nuns. Aretino wrote the Oratio Heliogaboli ad meretrices. Alberti, correct it would seem in his personal conduct, did not scruple to accept the dedication of Beccadelli's infamous Hermaphrodite [ ] There is scarcely one of the band whose work is free from sexual dirt, and their lives were as their writings. It has been said -- no doubt truly -- that public opinion by this time, looked upon the artist and the man of letters as a special kind of creatures, [ ] in whom laxity of life was no longer shocking. Familiarity with the spectacle of such wickedness, and a general toleration of whatever was well expressed, slowly corrupted the judgment of those ill authority also, and after the spectacle of popes who were good men giving employment to such active agents of moral dissolution we come, in the next generation, to popes who, themselves good-living men, begin to promote badliving men even into the Sacred College. Finally, there come popes whose own lives are an open scandal. #### It is a curious thing that the two popes who, above all others, were by temperament in sympathy with the Renaissance, and who lavished honours and wealth upon the new humanist scholars -- Nicholas V and Paul II -- were taught by practical experience how real was the determination of some of these to restore the Rome of antiquity, even at the expense of the papacy. In the time of Nicholas V Stefano Porcaro and his associates had planned to capture the pope and his cardinals, if necessary to kill them, and to set up the republic. This was in January 1453. The plot was, however, discovered on the eve of the day appointed and the conspirators taken and executed. #### Ten years went by -- the years when Calixtus III and Pius II were too engrossed with the urgencies of the crusade to be able to spare time or money for the patronage of poets and the arts. Then, in 1464, the newly-elected Paul II, re-arranging the curia, dismissed a number of the humanists appointed by Pius II. First they petitioned and then they threatened, prepared, they told the pope, to bring about a General Council before which he would have to justify his action. Their leader, Bartholomew Sacchi, called Platina, was arrested, put to the torture, and imprisoned in Sant' Angelo. After a time he was released, and presently, in revenge, he organised a new conspiracy. #### The centre of this was Julius Pomponius Laetus, the most extreme -- not to say eccentric -- of all the humanists of Rome, a scholar who to the best of his ability and knowledge lived the life of Latin antiquity, refusing to learn Greek lest it injure the perfection of his Latin pronunciation, worshipping the Spirit of Rome, the leader of a band of like-minded semi-heathen freethinkers. Their aim was to re-establish the Republic of classical time and to drive out the pope and the whole body of clergy. In February 1468 the papal police suddenly rounded up the chiefs of the party. Again Platina was taken, again he was arrested and tortured. The plot, so the pope declared, [ ] was twofold -- to set up paganism once again in Rome and to murder himself. Presently Pomponius Laetus was arrested in Venice, and handed over to the pope. He too, like Platina, now confessed himself a most repentant Christian and, terror-stricken, begged for mercy. Their lives were spared, and presently they were released. Pomponius lived to become the principal tutor of three future popes, Leo X, Clement VII and Paul III; Platina to rise to great favour in the reign of Sixtus IV, the successor of the pope against whom he had plotted. He now became Vatican librarian, and was able to revenge himself on Paul II for all time by writing his life. |