goodletters_barzun

7/27/2019 GoodLetters_Barzun

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%*fl aerl* 5 u**q ## %.42 a Fxotrr DnwN To DecRoE'NcEmofe modest settings, as "d.irectors of conscience," th.y wefe regutady cofl-sulted by the members of the family, most often the women. Molidre's Tartffidepicts the arcangernent. In tirne, ii tea to such abuses that it was denouncedon both moral "na intellectual grounds (21 9;345>) 'Meanwhle, by c re and thought and conrinualry revised methods, theJesuits shone as schoolmasters-unsurpassed in the histoty of education'They taught secular subiects as well as chorch doctrine and did so with ruxex-ampred id.rrtand.ing and kindness toward their pupils. Their success \il/asdue to the most efficient form of teacher-training ever seell' They knew thatborn teachers are as scarce as true poets and' that the next best cannot bemade casually out: of indifferent matlrials, so th.y devised a pfeparation thatincluded exhaustive learning and a severe winnowing of the unfit at everyphase of along aPprenticeshiP' The Jesuits set uP schools bY the

The university of paris opposed the Jesuits score' In mid -17 C Europe there werenot merely because they were from "t*o"d *::t- .schools and pupils than in thebut because they competed with *to*. lt mid-19C' Indeed' there soonwas com-salaried posts at the University by on*rir[ pPi* of too many schools for the

pop-education free. xt is nor hard fot fu-; dation. All likely youths, rich or poor'united, crever, and courageous men to do wefe given the means to attend, and thegreatthingsintheworld.Tensuchrnenmeritsofthesystemu/efeshordySeenaffebt 100,000. in the galaxy of brilliant minds that it-BuncKHARDT, JuncunN-rs oN Hrronf prodoced. From Descartes to \lcltaireand beYond, a good many PhilosoPhers

and scientists were educared by the Jesuits. Some of these bdght pupils wenton ro un,Jermine the dogmas they had so well learned; they became leaders ofthe 1gc Enlightenm.rr,lro rvhorn the church was the "infamous thing" thtymust crush (361>)'

So nen rN THrs sroRY' events and ideas have suggested three themes: pRIM-ITI\rISM, INDTVIDUALISM, and EMANCIPATToN. The first and last, audible inLurher's proffer of Christian liberry and based on what rnight be called thechtrrchlessness of the gospels, succeeded in putting an end to the $7est's uniryof belief' It also foreshadowed tlre third theme, rNDrvrDUALrsM, not as ai political or social right, but as an as$umption behind the proliferation of se6s,,, Ii' themselves a result of the individual's untrammeled relation to Gorl.Side by side with this revolutionary idea, another of equal po\Mer was also$,,, at r:itork strengthening the awareness and the claims of the individual. This was, Humanism, to which passing reference has been made in characterizing figures!" important in the revolution. Humanism, too, grevr out of concern with the

il$:""ed his lack of proficiency in classical Latin, which his prot6g6:[Me]anchthon had mastered like any good humanist. And Calvin, we sau/, wasruained humanistically without turning atheist. The appellation obviously hadseveral connotations at the dawn of our eta and has acqoired rnore since.hrious adiectives have been added to it seculaE theistic, naturalistic, andbven esthetic Humanisnf .'l' To rnake things more complicated, the name is associated with that ofi.enaissance, which is also an elastic tetm. One meets the latter in readingbout many things-painting diplom ac!,or the geniuses who possess morehan one talent-Renaissance men. And both its meaning and its clate are inieflnanent dispute. But this confusion is not hopeless. If one is willing to gol,,!ak to origins, one sees the usual growth of anev/ cultural interest, a changeif.clirection in purposes and feelings. Those origins take us back some 150lar:s before the Modern Era.

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44 ca FRou DawN To DEcADENCEOh century! Oh letters! It is a ioy to be alive. The term humanistwas first applied_Ur*cH voN Hurre* ro prncKHErMER, by Gerrnan scholars of the eady 19C to

SncnBrany ro rHE ENrpnnon (1513) writers who in the 1'4C and 15C reject-ed parts of the immediate past in favor

of the culture th.y perceived in the classics of ancient Rome. They were P^r-ticutady keen about the Latin style of these classics.

The label Humanism is odd-th e ism of being human-but it is not arbi-ffI;;ffifr*:,:,xffi #.'JjL:i,*:fr?T:':::K:*r:;',T;i#phy and expressed in a more elegant grammat andconcise vocabulary. Thesequalities defined what the humanists liked to call the "good letters." By com-parison, the prose of the medieval scholastics was barbaric and fit only fordiscussing theology. It was far from ignoring Man, but it was logic-chopping^rLd it linked all human corlcerns to the hereafter. Such was the animus of cer-tain gifted writers born in It,aly in the first third of the 1.4C, notably Petrarch,Salutati, and Boccaccio, whose disciples made humanism the cultute ctf thenext centufies.Their negative view'\r/as unfair; the Humanists owed rnore to the pastthan th.y knew or acknowledged-the fypical attitude of innovators. Butsince their positive views have shaped western thought and action to this d"y,. the conception of humanitas that came out of the preoccupation with stylewants looking at. We still sperak of "the humanities" and keep ttembling at thedanger th.y ate rrt, appafentty their permanent condition. But '\r/e are not3;I6';*:x;*rt are orwhv so called' Are thtv iust college subfects orFor the original Humanists, the ancient classics depicted a civilizattonthat dealt udth the affairs of the urodd in ^ marr-centered way. Those books-nr;#fl :'1n,HIT:,:::iJf'T"i#']trJ*T*::l*lH:ir-subordi nate to an overriding scheme that put off human happiness to thed"y of judgment. The theme of secuLARISM emerges from this outlook.Humanitas, that is, the studies it involved, opened a vista on the goals thatcould be reached on earth: individual self-development, action rather thanpious passivity, a ltfe in which reason and will can be used both to improveworldly conditions and to observe the lessons that nanffe holds for thethoughtful. The Humanists were scholars, but th.y had no use for an ivorytower. With this vision in rnind, it is not sulprising that Cicero became thehurnanists' cultrrre hero. A writer of superb prose, an otator and statesrnan, amoral philosopher, and the last defender of Republican Rome, he had all thevlrtues and talents of the ideal Humanist, except rhat of able warrior. His"irnperishable farrte" perished only when physical science began to drive Latinout of the curriculum around 1890. Until then, urhich is to say for 500 years,

ideas and catchphrases from Cicero'sspeeches and writings, together with theworks of other Romans, filled therrinds of educated western mari andwoman after bedeviling the young inschool. The strucfure of thought andargument in the western languages hasbeen influenced by Cicero, and the oration(s1>).Besides Cicero's works, Livytr patriotic history of Rome and its wars withCarthage; the Annals and Germania of Tacitus (), and different conceptions of Greece have flourished insuccessive periods. But throughout, *re highty educated were supposed to havema.stered both the ancient languages, and the clergy must k"tw Hebrew inaddition" It is a noteworthy feanrre of Z}Cculrure that for the first time in overa thousand years its educated class is not expected to be at least bilingual. "{


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46 w FxoM DAwN To DEcADE NCEdebate. The rwo go together wirh the belief that the best guides to the goodlife Lre Reason ancl Nature. Finding this assumPtion tll-i*portant, sonlemoderns have caqped at the eaily Humanists for fussing over grammar andwords, but it is ftarcl to see how th.y could have ptoduced scholttly editionsof the ancienr works that th.y valued so highly without fi.rst mastering theminutiae of language. In ^ny case, what is the point of saying about innova-tors that th.y rft"Ja have done what later comers were able to do after theground had been cleared fot them?As for the Humanist method, it is the one still in universal use. Its con-ventions are commonplace everywhere: in government, business, the weelCyrn gazines, and even in schoolwork-who has escaped "research"? whodares ignore exacr quotation and date, consulting previous work, citingsources, listing bibliography, and sporting that badge of candor, the foot-note?'The accepted authors have not been as stable, though drawn from thesame pool. Cicero's rise and fall has been mentioned; with every shift ofmood new names emerge fror:n relative neglect or oust others from the topplaces. The nev/ droices point to a recurtent cultural need that can bedescribed as "elements tha t are wanted l' because lacking at that moment'The freshly ad,mired fig*es correspond to that felt need. The passing of ageneration usually ends a battle and installs those who urged new heroes, whodeserve what is amusirgly called lasting fzme. Today, the whole Occidentalcanon is r.mder attack by rnany people who find it out of tune, useless,although th.y could not readily say who is in it.In the 15th and 16C the contitroing enthusiasm for the ancients was tein-forced by the feeling that the inhedted culnrre'was dissolving and hete'v/as astorehouse of ideas and attirucles with which to rebuild. It was like going upto the attic and polishing up semi-discarded treasures. The names of authofs'the titles of their books, the topics treated were ftesh, not the old bores; theyformed a tield of discovery al} untouched, a mine to exploit for those ambi-tious of liter ary fame. Hence the passionate search for old manuscript$ tosave from loss, to comparcand edit. Scholars traveled vridely to ransack cas-tles and monasteries; wealthy arnateurs sent agents to buy in Constantinopleand the Greek cities. The monks had copied and recopied the old texts andhoused them for amillenniuffi, but th.y had regarded them in another light.To be sure, as ear\y as the 1,zcwhen Frederick II of Hohenstaufen had heldcourt at Naples, [e had shown a true humanist interest, extending even toArabic works, but he was a lone exception'To explain the curious fact that the Middle Ages valued the ancientsenough to keep rheir works copied but did not breed Humanists calls for aTheory of Aspect. It would state than an obiect or idea is rarely seen in the

THe Gooo Lprrpns @ 47round. Like a mountain, it presents a variety of faces. Moved by an ulteriorpurpose, observers take a few of thesr: for the whole. This is a cinrral gener-tliqt It accounts for the suqprising differences in the value put on the sameartist or thinker at different times and flor the different pasts depicted by dif-fereni historians. This partiality should not be surprising; it is a fatnitar factof life: each individual "takes" only some elements of e*p.rience, and thatspontaneous choice governs tastes, career, estimates of woith, and the feel oflife itself.

For the eady Humanists, the aspects that shone out in the works of antiq-uity were the beauty of the language and the novel features of avanished civi-lization. Iloth gave rise to a new sense, the sense of history which may bedefined as the simultaneous perception of difference and similarity betweenpast and present' But had the medievals no historical av/areness? They thoughtof themselves as descendants of the F.oman Empire; they veneraterJ the firstChdstian emperor, Constantine, and his feudal inheritor Chademagne. TheyreaC Vit$l and thought that one or another of the Trojan heroes in his poemhad founded this or that western nertion. That same poem was also used as a"means of foretellitg the future, by o1:ening it atrandom and reading some oneIine on the page. For Vit$l had been a:magician. All this is a clue ,o"rlr. Middlelg.t' attitude toward history. They merged time and space indiscrimin ately.They mingled factand legend and miracle,and being preoccupied with eterniry,th.y "took" sameness and continuity as more real than development andchange-hence, no history in the modern sense e34>).Sfith the usual pride of advanced thinkers, the Humanists saw their

il , In. dispute is not one of those thal can be senled; judgment depends on:. how the viewet takes the unquestioned facts. But it can also be held that thereltu is no need to "take" sides. In the first place, the traditional Renaissance is like ai,,movable feast. The Italian Petrarch in the 14C is deemed the first full-bloodedt Humanist" "Renaissance" ptittirg is the great achievement of rhe 15C.i; Eras:rnus, Atiosto, Tasso, Rabelais, l\4ontaigne, Shakesp eate) and the ptdiadeL:poets in France are all labeled Renaissance writers, and th.y belong to the l6C.ir,So d,:es Renaiss ance music. As we sa.u/, Erasmus, arriving in England in 1,497,,. .


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4g q FxoM DA\rN To DBcapENCEwas gladto find that English scholars were nou/ abreast of "the good letrers."In short, the culnrral featores of the so-called RenaissalLce moved north andwest from Italy during a culnrr d,Iagof some two and ahalf centuries.These dates ."r, ,.rve to calm the dispute: since the Modern Era is seenas beginning around 1500 and Petrarch is seen as the eadiest Humanist' theRenaisr"*.. i, a going concern in the 1 4C and 15C, which is to say before theModern Era, ,rr,1 th"s part of the medieval, its germs present in the lateMiddle Ages, its fruitfulness intensified in the eady modern er^. So viewed,the black-and-white contrast between eras disappears: it'v/as an illusion of theinnovators, serviceable to them as self-encoufagement. To us, it is tenableonly if we make comparisons over a wide Bap, say betrveen 1'250 and 1550-Aquinas with Erasmus, or the trrio towers of Chartres cathedral, built 200years apa.rt.In this perspective, the inquiring rcader can safely enioy bothbor.khrrait Hisnrl of Ciuitirytion in the Renaissance and his challengerHuizinga's LVaning of tbe Middte Ages'-Bvo masterpieces of culnrral history,tu/o visions that complement each other in spite of partial disagreement.

Since the pasr"g. of time always brings on difference, "the" Humarrist isan abs tract figure trtra must be rnade concfete by examples. Nuances in anevolving ideJand the rurbulent culture then ^pPe r together as they should'One **, obviously begin with the veneration for the ancients and their lan-guage as recorded in the life and work of

PetrarchThe son of aFlorentine notary young Francesco, born in 1304, began byst'dying law, but being left impoverished after his father's political exile to

souther-n Fr"nce, he became a priest. By his 30th year he was famous ^s apoer-so famous that ln a revival of the ancient custom of crowning a herowith laurel leaves, a Roman senator crou/ned him "poet laureate." Petrarch gavethanks in a Latin oration on a text by Virgil. But this Latinity'\vas only part ofhis renov/n. Petrarch's name today evokes that of Laura, to whom the poetwfote sonnets and odes fot yeat's, and

Think you, if Laura had been Petrarch's these were in Italian' Incidentally' hewife, r:,,,'a rriarr rJGs'r t'Lr'orv'e made no attempts at intimacli indegd,He would have written sonnets all his life? so varied was the purely literary tribute-BvnoNrN DoNrueN $::1"ff:'Hff"*:t?#':ffff:deconsuuction with a vengeance"

This e^r\y Humanist rjrual of laureateship, somewhat dimmed, is stiliwith us. As everybody knows, it persists in England, where it is a lifetinre Postwhose holder is expected to ..Lb r^te gteat events in verse. The harvest ofpoetryhas been small. In the United States since 1985 a series ofincumbents

Tne Gooo LBT.TERS @ 49have held the title fot one yer each, with the modest expectation that theitelevation will publici ze the imponance of literanrre. Petrarch's celebration atRome signifies much more: it means that the aur a ofthe Roman past was inthe "rt, intimation's of what was to come. It is in his combining ,,elements that\I/ere wanted" andadding one or t'rvo that Petrarch is a nev/ rrrrrr, who inspiredimitation without end.The one thing of mon etary vzrlue that he inherited from his father was amanuscript of Cicero. The work fi.lled his mind with ancient facrs and ideas; auip to Rome fixed his vision. For there he saw and marveled at the antiquities,tangible remains of a culture once alive and complete. It mayhave helped thevision that the city iust then was no longer pap^l Rome: a schism in thechurch had exiled the popes to l$ignorr, *h.r. p.tr^tch grew up. The pope'scourt there gave the young rnan a dristaste for intrigue, which ma6e him refuse,rfficial posts-even university recrorships-all r.i, m..Instead, he set himself to earn his keep as a writer, though not, of course,by the sale of his works. He was at first partof the household of the Colonna**tt then, when famous, he sen'ed as envoy to various prince;s. Diplo macyjn his dty was occasiond, not a pefmanent exchange of resident ambrsr"dors,as it became in the 1'6C. In the rnid-l 4th, ro-.orre with a rcady choice ofr67e1d5-fatin vis1d5-ui2s despatched to make a formal speech on the mat-tet ^t issue. Petratch excelled in the required rhetoric, and though hisspeeches tarcIy produced results, his disting"lshed presence flattered thelecipient prince and his words were appreciated by ,n invited audience ashigh entertainment.

To earn a more than passing repute as a poet, Petrarch started an epic inI-atin on the deeds of the Romarr hero Scipiq the commander-in-chief in the'second war against Carthage--hence the title Afn* for the epic. It wasnever finished, partly because Petrarch never gained ease in handling theclassic metres-any more than he mastered Greek, though he tried morethan once. This falling short of the later Humanists' pan"pfy accounts forone modern scholar's quaint description of him as only "the vanguard of thechanged emphasis.""

11 coNscIousNESS. It is allied to INDTvIDUALISu but it differs frorn it in being1 not a social and political condition but a mental state. One can be in prison,


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50 @ FRoM DawN ro DE'cADENCEindividuatity all but submerged, and yer be acutely self-conscious'Individualisrn has limits impor.i by the coexistence of many other individu-als; self-consciousness has none. Over the centuties it has dug ever deeperintotheego,*ithncrboundatyinsight.Another singul rrrtty in Petrarch's life was that he climbed a high hill insouthern France in order to admire the vievr.' If it was done before him, it wasnot recorde,J. Nature'had been endlessly discussed, but as a generality, not asthis ;andscape. As fcrr Petrarch's nurture of his unique self, it included chang-ing his name, for. apurpose that cartonly be called esthetic. Petrarch was bornFrancesco di petr"..o, but with ,a poet's ear he decided that it was not aeuphonious run of syllables. Cuttinga r, addin ganrto lengthen the middle a'and changing , to a at the end to make

Petrarca (in Latin poeta ends n o) was asWhether we wish to leave sorne memory of deft a piece of work as making a go'dourselves to Posterity by thinking or otriti"g vefse.something and thus to arrest the flight of N."rly the whole of Petrach's verseHln:n$,S:ffiJffi.tfi;ff iid f,o,. i, in errect autobiographv'HewroteanexplicitoneentidedfutterTffil, oru rHE sorrr'*v Lne to Posterifl' "'d hi' letters to ftiends

;T.",tr',JlTJ: l:"l: T"XH' Hfelt. Introspecrion followed by seH-Iortraitute is linked in Petratch u'ithanother novelry tlre expfess desire for eternal fame. It too is a revival of anancient habit, and not the kind of passion that one would readily confess to in^n agethat still desired eternal bliss. Since Petrarch, every poet has follorvedhim ("rrd Horace) by appealing to posreriry and promising eternal renown tothe patron of the wort tttror.tgh its being tied to the author's o\I/n'

Although in rhe Lavrapoems peuarch strikes the personal note, and theemotions are fresh and "i"idly described, we are not given the kind of detailthat brings out a unique character such as'we find G"y) in Merefith's ModernLoue. ,,character,, is a later invention (135; 140>). It was no doubt Pettarch'ssimpler notion of self that made him so imitable. After him and without end,Europe has been flooded wirh lovelornery in sonnet form. The species thatwe owe to petrarch is now regarded as if the, commafid: "thou shalt stoP atfourteen lines,, had been otteied on Mount sinai. But it was a happy nrrn ofpractice that established it; no ancient model existed, and in Petrarch's d^ysonnets--verses to be soand,ec,to be sung-were of various lengths. The no\ilrtraditional length is just right for asmall orarion-exposition, developrnent,and conclusion. And th^t .lussical form, so closely studied and

practiced by

Tnp Goon rirrERS @ 51the Humanists, has remained a pattetn that govefns western creations, frompub]ic speaking to poetry, drama,prose, and the symphony (419>).True, the span of fourteen lines does not suit alt languages equally well,which is why (fot instance) French poets have used the iorm sparingly. Butso.rrrit sequences like Petrarch's or Shakespeare's make possibl, u nirrative-by-episode; the poet need not versifil any connective matter as he must in anepic. Ratheq he anticipates by five or six hundred years the technique of filmand television. Meredith found he needed sixteen lines for the sonnets ofMttdern l-oue and his great story is none the worse for this retufn to the free-dom of choice abolished by petrarch.The imitatots, with their exaggerated sighs of love and cries of despairaddressed to an idol in female shape have r.p."t.dly brought the love lyricinto distepute. Gefmany at one time went Petrarch-mad and during such hightides of production Petrarchist becarne a term of abuse. But the genre alwaysrebounded, and not solely to express love; it has conveyed passign allied todescriptions of nature or to moral reflections and political opirrior,r.Peftarch himself showed that a poet bent on th. contemptrtirr. life could,at the shock of an event, trun politicatr. A commoner named Cola di Rien ziledan uprising in 1347 and "restored the Roman republis"-f6r a few rnonths.0Wtgt.r's eady opera uses his name and story,) Petrarch, then in his exlyfor-ties, u/as overjoyed at this revival of another classical instinrtion, though hedid not St up hobnobbing with *re tyrants who ruled the several Italiancities; his ideal remained untouched by the facs. Uke his predecessor Danteancl other writers yet to come, he longed for a united Italy. His ,,Oc{e to Italy,,ancl othet pieces foretold glories of the kind he read about in Livy.This utopian wish \il/as another l{umanist departrrre: educatecl men andwomen began to revere the Roman republic instead of the empire that had sodeeply stirred the Middle Ages. Cicero fighting to save a free governmenrbecame the model citizen, even to the loyal subjects of 16C princes. (laesar wasthe hatecl usuqper and Brutus a hero for killing him-witness Shakespeare's

Julius Caesar. Uke the value put on the judgment of Posterirr this excitementabout political ideals shorrs the imprcrtance that the Humanist temper anachedto rvoddly things.But one must not ovedook opposites and contradictions. I{umanists\Mere not indifferent to religion or v/antirg to replace Christianity with pagan-ism. Those called Humanists today mayrule out the divine and make Man themeasure of all things, but Petrarch, for one, remained deeply reli.gious. Allsecular wotks, he said, took second place to the gospel; he had a cult for SaintAqy.rstine and late in life wro te a tract on Cont.tnpt for the Wo66. It was asort of confession of sins paralleling the antt-Laura poems. He even attackedthe followers of Averrods, the Arab physician-philoiopher, for being materi-alists and infidels. One can i*"grtte Petrarch in old age retiring to aHumanist


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52 qa FRou DawN To DecapENCEconvent, had there been such a thing. A11 he wanted to do then'il/as cultivatethe good letters so as to "shut out the reality of my own times."What m^y mislead about the Humanists' genuine faith is that, afterPetrarch, writers of all tendencies mingle the pagan mythology, history, andgeography with the Christian. Milton, the firrn believer, is a prime example:his poems are filled with nymphs and ancient rnyths. Poets took pleasure inusing a set of fresh words; the narnes of the gods, heroes, places, and deedsformed a treasury of new images and sounds. Humanists freely refet to the"divine Plato," the "divine Seneca"; some useJove to mean God orJehovah,or call it Providence when a god in Homer protects a warrior-all this with-out a thought of being free*rinkers, heretics) or atheists. From reading theancients the conviction grew that some of thern, by their thoughts and lives,were almost Christians. \We saw Erasmus invoking "Saint Socrates." Manybelieved that Plato failed to be a Christian only because Revelation had notyet occurred. Seneca the Roman Stoic was revered for his austere ethics andhis conception of a universe obedient to a single god, remote though Senecathought him.After this merger of traditions it is not surprising to see the RenaissanceHumanists followed in the 17Cby thinkers who professed themselves Stoicswithout abandoning their equal claim to being Christians. These things beingso, it seerns bad history to keep referring today to "ourJudaeo-Christian her-itage." Pagan or Graeco-Roman ought to be added to the phrase, not to marka separate strand but ^s a fused element like the other two. To cite but oneitem, the endless effort to change sociery for the better, urhich is a charactet-istic of the last five centuries, cornes from the Graeco-Roman ttadition. Tosay this is to point agfu to the presence of Humanism thtoughout theModern Era.

**x).

They have no concern llor music or rhetoric orthe metrical att. Oratory and poetfy arealmost unknown. For them, all study in logicis futile disputation. You rarely find anyonewho owns the works ,of Aristotle and otherphilosophers. The students at the new uni-versity devote themselves largely to pleasureand are avid for food and wine, nor are theyrestrained by any discipline. D"y and nightth*y roam about inflictjing iniuries on citizensand their heads are cornpletely turned by theshameless women.-Pops Prus II anour VmuNa, c. 1458

For all these reasons, during the 17th and 18C the young well-to-do fromelsewhere must make the GranrJ Tlo.tr, of which the peak expe:rience was toenjoy, under a tutor's informed gtridance, the art and easy life of Rome andFlotence, possibly of Naples and \Ienice. Milton's tour was decisive for his'itocation, and it has been plausibly suggested that Paradise Lostou/es much torfie Italian author of Adamo Caduto (The Fall of Adam)." As for rhose aspir-lng to be artists, it was imperative that th.y go and "finish" themselves at the{iource, Italy. Ftance and the United States still maintain for them under thename of Academy residences in Rome.That the rest of Europe freely conceded its own barbartsm and praisedritaly was not a wholly poised judgment. It partook of the social climber'srepudiation of his origins and eagerness for acquiring abroad the right tastesand behavior. To be fashionable in some particular foreign way has been arecurrent phenomenon in the west. After ltaly, it was Sp^in that radiated light;then France imposed its v/ays and later went Angtophile, not once but trrrice(361;498>). After a short-lived Germanism in England and France, th.Orient, and last the United Statr:s have been the irresistible model, followedeven when denounced.Almost always, though not in that first Italian example, these fads comein the wake of the political or economic might of the admired nation. This iscurious, since it is artists and intell.ecflrals, noted for being abor,'e such mun-dane realities, who generate these cultural infaruations.At the beginning of the successive "ages of the Renaissance" north andrnest of ltaly, when Italian poeffy, dtama, and prose fiction urere taken asmodels, together with the Humanist scholady methods, attention to the writ-


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54 @ FRoM DawN ro DEcADENCEren word affected enlightened opinion on law, history, politics, and religion.Establishing a text by comparing sources, veriSring dates, weighing evidenceand witnesses' credibility, while also analyztng usage, impressed on theEuropean mind the effect of the passage of time: documents began to be readcritically; oral traditions lost authority unless confirmed. The age of indis-pensabie literacy hacl begun. The first fruit of this org nrzed skepticism wasthe demonstration by Lorenzo Valla that the Donation of Constantine was aforgery. This document, purportirg to be from the hand of the first Christianempero r, gayethe popes their territorial possessions, thus adding the worldlyto the spirinral powei Vu[, showed that the languzge andallusions belongedto alatet age than the emPeror's.This proof gave comfort to the Reformers: their enemy the pope v/as ausurper on earth as he was in heaven. And although the Evangelicals lookeddown on the Humanists' pursuit of the telltale word, pious students ofScripture had to use that same method themselves. The many new editionsand translations of the Bible could not have been made without it. Theseworks embod.ied the primary criticism of Scripture. Soon followed what isknown as the "higher criticism" ofthe Testaments: questioning the substanceafter questioning the words (359>). This discipline is still at work today,thoogh v/ith a freedom that would have petrified the pioneers. The special-tzed,journals discuss such questions as whether I(ng David ever existed and.,Did Sarah Have ^ Seminal Emission?"" In general, 16C scholarsfipstrengthened the Protestant idea that the gosPel, not the church, was thefouni of doctrine. Xt is a Humanist principle that if you want to know thetruth, go to the sources, not tkre commentators. In short, Humanism andReform, without being allies, converged in one point toward the same goal.This factwould seem enough to lusti$l th. usual phrase "Renaissance andReformation" to label the culture of the 16C'

The leading Humanists did not, of course, share the Evangelical passion.The Renaissance popes, Humanists by taste if not by wotks, despised theprotestants as bigors and heretics. S7ere the Humanists in fact atheists? If not,what was their faith? Erasmus, \trze know, u/as sure he was a good Christian.petrarch went from fairhful to devout, first wooing the world then wanting to,1ve it up. The d.ifference bet'ween these two representative positions is one ofL."l"gy, of ideology. Each is Jrased on different parts of the gospel: Christc me to forgive sini ^s aspur to living the right life; this is a moral and socialconcefn. He also preached giving up the wodd, a prerequisite to the soul's sal-vation. Canone follow both comrnands?

The uuth that religion and rnoral-iry are at odds with each other is rarelyacknowledged, probably because thetwo desires are equally strong in thehuman breast, reflecting there the res-pective demands of sociery and of theself. The dogma that a repentant sin-ner-say, the Prodigal Son-is to becherished ahead of the merely moralchancter has great appeal. Uke Luther,popular opinion prefers the rogue,once he is tamed, to those dull clodsurho have resisted temptation. But ifadopted by most people as a rule oflife, the sentiment would make for anything but ^ peaceful sociery.The Italian Humanists witnessed one fit of Evangelical zeal and it wasenough. Toward the end of the L5(l the monk Girolamo SavonarcLa rousedthe Florentines to a high pitch of dcvotion that led to the famous; "bonfire oftlre vanities." Such a high ideal tension cannot be sustained by ^whole corn-nrunity for very long, and when this one broke, the prophet u/as declared aheretic and burned at the stake with public approval. Savon arolahad been tooliteral-too Evangelical-in using the words of Chdst to convert the masses.Good Christian Humanists were moral beings of the conve:ntional sort,but their trained minds wanted something more: a metaphysics that wouldreformulate or at least parallel in classical terms the Catholic theology. Mostof thenn found it in Plato. He had taught that human beings are in a c vewirhtheir backs to the entrance and lc'oHng at the inner wall, which reflects di*lythe reality outside. Interpreted, this means that the senses give an imperfectc,)py of the eternal forms of Being. These are the proper object of humanattention. By steady effort, the individual can raise his sight fronr the love ofearthly things to the love of eternal beaury which consisrs of those purefotms. Such is the Platonist's grace and salvation.

Perhaps because this prospect is somewhat dry and abstract, ;2 frurrlber oftlrese Neo-Platonists added to it rrarious beliefs from the Cabbalaand the tra-ditions of "white magic." Plato, drus turned into a theolo gun,harl the advan-ttge of getting rid of Atistotle, the great buttress of scholastic theology, novzrejected. Aristode was a physicist, b,iologist, social scientist, and aesthetician.Flis system gave matter basic importance. He taught that wealth, friends, andcomfort were Paft of the good life and prerequisites of virrue; fo:r every idealpossibility rests on a natural (material) base. Though Plato's laddr:r to eternalfclrms u/as closer to Christian aspiration, a minoriry among Humanists,

TsB Gooo Lsrrsns @ 55Mry not a man be a Christian who cannotexplain how the nativiry of the Son differsfrom the procession of the Holy Spirit? If Ibelieve in the Trinity in lJnity, I want no argu-ments. If I do not beliere, I shall not be con-vinced by reason. The sum of religion ispeace, which can only be when definitionsare as few as possible and opinion is left freeon many subiects. Our present problems aresaid to be waiting for the next EcurnenicalCouncil. Better let thern wait till we see Godface to face.-Enasuus (1522)


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No mortal thing enthrall these longing eye$When perfect Peace in thy fair face I found;But far within; where all is holy ground,My soul felt Love, her comracle of the skies-MTcHELANGELo, FRoM Solxnr 52

for the ideat beauty that he Put intothem and that, for him, made theitmateriality disappear. His love sonnetsworship the same ineffable entity tn awoman, Vittoria Colonna, to whomthev arc addtessed.

"56 ,a FRoM DawN To DEcADENCEattracted by the new fittdittgs of science, still adhered to the Aristotelian Phi-

losophy, especially afterit became known in its original texts, another fruit ofthe new scholarshiP.From then on, the two parties-are they tempefaments?-have carriedon this same debate ovef Matter and ldea, but not on equal terms. In succes-sive periods one outlook tends to predominate and to perm eate every intel-lectual activity, incl.uding natu:ral science itself, where the opposite ofMaterialism takes the n*. Vitalisrn (665>). This seesaw has been greatlyproductive; the stimulating effect of toppling the orthodoxy is a culnrral con-Itant. [The book to read ts Rena'issance Thoughtby Paul Oskar I(risteller.]For natures inclined to mysticisrn, Plato (and his later expounder Poqphyty'who showed hour to lift one's gmefrom sensuous to absuact beaury) satisfieda strong desire akin to the Reformers' for apure faith- Michelangelo, for exam-ple, *hlr. hand was subdued to nrratter like any ditch digger's, valued his wod':snot for their artistic merit, as u/e do, but

Tr+B Gooo LpTTERS @ 57Favoring neithet Plato nor l\ristotle, Valla has even been classed amongLuthet's forerunners.' His chief interest, historg led lfm to translateHerodotus and Thucydides into Latin, for most readers \ilrere as yet unable toread Greek. This reminds us that for agood while afterthe Humanist awaken-ing half the ancient wodd and its fund of wisdom were still a vague or second-hand reality. The entry of Greek into minds overflowing with Cicero's Latin'v/as a dtarrtatic event and another Italian scoop. With Greek came Plato in thegulse just described, and through rhe career and works of Valla's contemporary

Marsilio Ficino$re see at close range how lives and culture mesh. Chief rnover of theFlorentine Academy, inspirer of poets and statesmen, teacher of the l.g-endary Pico della Mirandola, Ficino $/as acclaimed in his time as supreme.T'hen he was unread for along time and he remains largely untranslated.He was six years old about the mid-15C when the Byzanttne emperorcame to Rorne with one of his scholars, the 80-year-old Geminthus Pletho.T'hey were seeking an alhance against the Turks, who were advancing uponClonstantinople, the Byzantine capital. A reconciliation of the Greek with theRoman church might also be discussed but it vras not concluded. Pletho lec-tured in Rome and startled his hearers by showing a firsthand larowledge ofPlato, rvho 'v/as still generally thought aninfidel. The Byzantines themselveswere deemed schismatics: th.y did not accept the Holy Ghost as an equalrnember of the Trinif, th.y celebrated Easter on the wrong date, and gaveo'ther slgns of wrong-headedness.

Accordingly, when Pletho talked Plato, the lecturer was suspected ofbeing the Devil come to seduce the taithful. But Cosimo de' Medici, thewealthiest banker and political boss of Florence, took a chance and invitedPletho to dinner. At the end of it Cosimo decided to found a school of Greek*rought. The idea simmeted a while, and four years after the falt ofConstantinople in 1'453 the school opened. Cosimo called it Accademia inhonor of the place where Plato trad taught in Athens, a grove honoring thehero Academos. Hence the modern term for schools, universities, and officialgtrardians of learning, while "acadernic" has had a checkered career in fine artarrd social opinion. (B.rrt Academe is not a synonym of academy: it is a variantsprelling of Academar.) Cosimo's instirution was a self-selected group of schol-ats who met regulady to keep abreast of one another's.'findings. It needed adirector, and Cosimo appointed ro the post the son of his own son's physi-cian: Giovanni de' Medici and Nlar:silio Ficino v/ere close frienrJs. ThoughMarsilio v/as only 25,hewas already a fine Latinist. He had also a passion formusic and a boundless curiosiry.About that time, another Byzannne, & refugee from the Turks named

To all this the materialist opposition says that the ideal does not existapartfrom the nanrral, the abstract from the concrete. It is too bad that inpopular use ..platonic love" rn.eans only absence of sexual relations. That,yp.^r reduction of an important idea prevents one from lrsing the termcon r.niently to deno te afecuffent stfiving in occidental culnrre, the longingfor the pure. Individuals and rnovelnents, not all tooted in religion of meta-physics, have repearedly proclaimed their pursuit or their achievement ofp*. love, pufe thought, pure forrn in art (622; 63940>)' It is a yearni:rgakin to PRIMITvISM.

The Humanist fusion of fairh and philosophy had a by-product whichdeserves to be called "toleration by absentmindedness." A chutch hidrarchythoroughly Humanistified is able to appreciate the varieties of religious expe-rience and, short of extremes such as savonarola's, tends to permit variations'After alJ., asood many of those ard-ent Platonists were in holy orders and f'elteasy about their role. Lorenzo valla provides a good example: when heexposed the Donation of Constantine, he feared sanctions in Rome and fl'edto Naples, where like a true Humanist he opened a school of oratory. Buteven at thateady date, the pope forgave him and found him a secretaryship.

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