Church, St. Anselm. Storrs, Bernard of Clairvaux. Compayré, Abelard. Laurie, The Rise and Early Constitution of Universities. Rashdall, Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, 2 vols. Deane, Translation of Anselm's Proslogium, Monologium, Cur Deus Homo. TRANSITION TO MODERN PHILOSOPHY 1. § 24. The Renaissance. Bruno I. The Renaissance and the Reformation. The neces sary conditions for the introduction of the modern period were brought about by the great movement which, from its various aspects, is called the Renaissance, or the Revival of Learning, or the Reformation. It has already been seen that this was no sudden appearance, but that the influences bringing it about had been at work at least as early as the Crusades. From that time on society was gradually becoming transformed, away from the ecclesiastical, and toward the secular ideal. The rapid growth of commerce and industry necessarily gave an emphasis to secular interests. The new social class which consequently rose to importance alongside the nobles and clergy, tended to ally itself with the king in his struggles with the feudal lords, since only through a strong central authority could trade and industry be protected; and this joined with other influences in building up a new national spirit. Presently nations began to attempt, with growing success, to break away from ecclesiastical control, and to separate the civil power from the spiritual. Here, again, the Nominalism of the later Scholastics threw in its lot with the new tendency, and we find Occam openly on the side of national authority, in its conflicts with the Pope. It was in Italy that the Renaissance first became an accomplished fact. Here the greater commercial activity, and the intense rivalry between the different cities, had early given rise to a pronounced and aggressive individual ism, and a sharpening of the wits without much reference to moral scruples. As early as the fourteenth century the main features of the Renaissance its interest in life, and its keener appreciation of the past, and the literature of the past appear in Petrarch and Boccaccio. But it is from the year 1453 that the Renaissance is commonly dated. In that year Constantinople, the capital of the Eastern Empire, which had continued, up to this time, to maintain an ignoble existence, was taken by the Turks. Many of the Greek scholars, driven from their country, took refuge in Italy. Here they found the soil prepared for them, and the result was immediate and revolutionary. The revelation of the real spirit of classical antiquity, to men beginning to feel the possession of new powers of life and capacities of appreciation, and heartily sick of the dry and tasteless theological nourishment with which they had had to satisfy themselves for centuries, completely overturned all their old ideas. The shackles of the Church fell from their minds, and they turned back to the past with a passionate delight. A civilization sprang up which, as opposed to the religious civilization of the Middle Ages, was thoroughly pagan in its spirit-pagan not only in its love of beauty and literature, and its delight in living, but also — as a reaction against the asceticism of the Church - in its vices, and its frank sensualism and egoism. The whole scale of values was shifted. Men cared more for an old manuscript of the poets than for the prophets and apostles; for a Greek vase or statue, than for temperance and holy living. A new zest for all that was human and beautiful found expression in a great period of artistic creation. Even the court of St. Peter's was paganized, and we have the spectacle of a series of Popes, sunk in vices, indeed, which have made their names synonyms of infamy, but still accomplished scholars, artistic dilettantes, and patrons of art and learning. In philosophy, nearly every system of ancient times was revived. Plato, the artist among philosophers, attracted a large following, and a Platonic Academy was founded in Florence. In opposition to him, other scholars set up Aristotle, interpreted not as he had been by the Church, but freely and naturalistically. So also Pythagoreanism and Neo-Platonism, Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Scepticism, and even some of the earlier Greek schools, found adherents. And in all there was the same eagerness to throw off ecclesiastical restraints, in the interests of a real intellectual activity. Beyond Italy, the Renaissance took on a somewhat different form. In Germany, where it had to do with a type of mind naturally profounder and more religious, and where, moreover, the religious life had already been deepened by the mysticism of Eckhart, and Tauler, and the Brethren of the Common Life, its most characteristic result was the Reformation of Luther. Even its Humanism, as typified in Erasmus and Melancthon, had more or less strong religious sympathies. But the Reformation was still in principle the same revolt against authority. By its doctrine of justification by faith, apart from any external mediation, and its appeal to immediate Christian experience, it stood directly for individual freedom, as opposed to the pretensions of the Church. With whatever differences of form, however, the change in the attitude toward life was a permanent one. The human spirit, once freed from the restrictions which ecclesiasticism had put upon it, could never return again to the same bondage. By the impulse which had thus been given, the whole aspect of the world had been changed. National life and secular pursuits had received a strength which made it impossible that the Church should ever usurp again in any universal way its old power. And along with these, there followed other changes, which in a short space still further revolutionized existing conditions. The voyages of Columbus and Vasco da Gama, Balboa and Magellan, resulting, among other things, in the discovery of America and of the road to the Indies, opened up vast possibilities which had not been dreamed of before. They changed the map of the Q world, and furnished a powerful spur to the imaginative and creative spirit - witness the Elizabethan age. In quick succession came also a series of inventions of world-wide significance. The discovery of gunpowder revolutionized the art of war, and put the common soldier and the noble on an equal footing; printing first made possible a generally diffused knowledge and culture; while the telescope laid open the structure of the heavens, and the compass enlarged the boundaries of the earth. And, finally, there came forward, to realize the new possibilities in the way of knowledge, a brilliant group of scientists of the first magnitude - Tycho Brahe, Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and others - whose investigations gave a firm foundation to those scientific methods and conceptions which were destined to enter so vitally into all future thought. In particular Copernicus, by shifting the centre of the universe from our earth, and making this but a point in a vast system, created a profound impression on men's imaginations, and perhaps more than any other one influence helped to cut the ground from beneath the narrow and earth-centred theological view of life, which hitherto had dominated men's minds. "The earth moves" became the recognized formula of advance. God could no longer be conceived as having His local habitation in the heavens; the whole geography of the spiritual world was thrown into confusion, and the way opened for a deeper conception of God's relation to the universe. The results of all this appear in the emergence of a wholly new way of looking at the world - the way of the modern man. Nothing could be more modern in tone, for example, than the essays of Montaigne. In their cool common sense, their cautious scepticism the assertion of the right of a man to think and judge for himself, their clear condemnation of superstition and religious fanaticism, and their wide spirit of toleration, they represent the complete divergence of cultivated thought from ecclesiastical influence, and the secularization of human life and interests. |