A World Lit Only by Fire (20 page)

In those centuries students who yearned for genuine learning had to become autodidacts. Medieval universities had exalted
three traditional disciplines: theology, law, and medicine, which were but distantly related to what they would later become.
Courses were offered in the “arts”—grammar, logic, rhetoric, dialectics—but these were considered inferior, and were chiefly
meant for youths planning to enter the lower clergy. Except in Italy, the arts teachers were usually Benedictine, Franciscan,
and Dominican monks. They paid lip service to the great leaders of Hellenic and Roman culture but were largely ignorant of
their works, except for selections or adaptations by scholars with an imperfect grasp of the ancient tongues. Few knew Greek;
they were dependent upon Latin translations of it.

The Latin of arts faculty members was so corrupted by scholastic and ecclesiastical overlays that it bore little resemblance
to the language of Rome at its peak. They knew Ovid and Virgil, but, typically, had interpreted the
Ars amatoria
, the Art of Love, as they had the Song of Solomon—not as a tribute to human sensuality, but as a mystic embodiment of divine
love. That was fraudulent, and because of its speciosity, the prestige of universities declined. Attendance at Oxford fell
from its thirteenth-century peak to as low as a thousand in the fifteenth century. Even academic freedom vanished after the
expulsion of John Wyclif, master of Balliol, in 1381. Wyclif had denounced the inordinate arrogance, wealth, and power of
the Catholic clergy. Five separate bulls had condemned him, and Oxford lectures since then had been subject to rigorous episcopal
control.

The reawakening—the establishing of new ties with the gems of antiquity—was one of the great triumphs of the Renaissance.
Its first seeds had been sown early in the fourteenth century, with the rediscovery of Latin classics; then the fall of Constantinople
to the Turks in 1453 gave impetus to the revival of Greek learning. Confronted with the overwhelming might of the infidels,
the religious and political powers of Byzantium appealed to their fellow Christians in the West for help, even if the price
was capitulation by the eastern Church to Roman orthodoxy. During the negotiations several Byzantine scholars traveled to
Rome, some to participate in the talks, some merely anxious to escape the Ottoman peril. With them they brought genuine Hellenic
manuscripts. For over a thousand years Italian professors fluent in Greek had assumed that the original texts of cultural
masterpieces had perished. Discovering that they had survived, specialists and emissaries traveled through Croatia, Serbia,
and Bulgaria to Constantinople, bearing gifts and gold and passionately searching for old manuscripts, statues, and coins,
tokens of the glorious past. Thus began the transfer of priceless documents from East to West, where they joined the great
Latin heritage of Italy.

The implications reached far beyond scholarship, leading to the redefinition of knowledge itself. The eventual impact on the
Continent’s hidebound educational establishment was to be devastating, discrediting medieval culture and replacing it with
ancient, resurrected ideals, paideia and
humanitas
. The best minds in the West began a scrupulous reappraisal of Scholasticism, which, for two centuries, had been degenerating
into an artificial sort of dialectics. In the ancient texts Renaissance scholars found an unsuspected reverence for humanity
which, without actually dismissing the Bible, certainly overshadowed it. And in the wisdom of antiquity they discovered respect
for man in the free expansion of his natural impulses, unfreighted by the corrupting burden of original sin. The Italian scholar
Leonardo Bruni declared: “I have the feeling that the days of Cicero and Demosthenes are much closer to me than the sixty
years just past.” Acclaim for humanity was the theme of
De dignitate et excellentia
, by Giannozzo Manetti, a Florentine philologist, and the
Oratio de hominis dignitate
, by brilliant young Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. The Christian faith was not repudiated, but the new concept of the cultivated
man was the Renaissance
homo universale
, the universal man: creator, artist, scholar, and encyclopedic genius in the spirit of the ancient paideia.

In that spirit Scotland and Ireland, despite their poverty, established the universities of St. Andrews, Glasgow, Aberdeen,
and Trinity College, Dublin, institutions destined to pour generation after generation of first-rate men into the intellectual
life of the British Isles. Between 1496 and 1516 five new colleges were founded at Oxford and Cambridge. Meantime, across
the Channel, the great transition had led to the founding of genuine, post-medieval universities at Genoa (1471), Munich (1472),
Uppsala and Tübingen (1477), Copenhagen (1479), Valencia and Santiago (1501), Wittenberg (1502), and Frankfurt an der Oder
(1506). Here lay the essence of the emerging intellectualism. Students like young Martin Luther, a member of the third class
to enter Wittenberg, and François Rabelais, at the older but restructured Montpellier, were taught that Renaissance meant
renewal, a recovery of those disciplines lost in the collapse of Roman civilization. The French refined it to
la Renaissance des lettres
, and though its leaders embraced more than literature—they sought the re-emergence of all the lost learning of the old
world, including the flowering of art, esthetics, mathematics, and the beginnings of modern science—the heaviest emphasis
was on reverence for classical letters, the poetical and philosophical Hellenic heritage, scholarly purity, and the meticulous
translation of the ancient manuscripts retrieved in Athens and Rome.

T
HE NEW PROFESSORS
, called humanists, declared the humanities to be superior to medicine, law, and theology—especially theology. Der Humanismus,
as the movement was known in Germany, its stronghold, coalesced during the last years of the Borgia papacy. In 1497, the Holy
Roman emperor Maximilian I served as humanism’s midwife by appointing Conradus Celtis, a Latin lyrical poet, to the most prestigious
academic chair in Vienna. Celtis used his new post to establish the Sodalitas Danubia, a center for humanistic studies, thereby
winning immortality among intellectual historians as Der Erzhumaniste (the Archhumanist).

Within a year his first manuscripts were at hand. Aldus Manutius, the great Italian printer and inventor of italic type (for
an edition of Virgil), had been toiling for twenty years on the Aldine Press to produce a series of Greek classics. His
editio princips
, a five-volume folio Aristotle edited by Aldus himself, was in proof and ready for scholars by late 1498. During the next
fourteen years it was followed by the works of all the Hellenic giants: Theocritis, Aristophanes, Thucydides, Sophocles, Herodotus,
Euripides, Homer, and Plato.

All this ferment led to that rarest of cultural phenomena, an intellectual movement which alters the course of both learning
and civilization. Pythagoreans had tried it, four hundred years before the birth of Christ, and failed. So, in the third and
fourth centuries
A.D
., had Manichaeans, Stoics, and Epicureans. But the humanists of the sixteenth century were to succeed spectacularly—so
much so that their triumph is unique. They would be followed by other ideologies determined to shape the future—seventeenth-century
rationalism, the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, Marxism in the nineteenth century, and, in the twentieth, by pragmatism,
determinism, and empiricism. Each would alter the stream of great events, but none would match the achievements of Renaissance
humanists.

By the end of the decade following Manutius’s accomplishment, humanism had begun to replace the old curricula, dominating
both the new universities and the refurbished old. Lecture halls were crowded, great libraries kept their well-worn works
of humanist scholars in constant circulation, and leaders of Europe’s metropolises—merchants, lawyers, physicians, bankers,
ship-owners, and the bright priests who, in the century’s fifth decade, would join the new Jesuit order—studied and discussed
the newly published humanist treatises, including the denunciation of Scholasticism by England’s Thomas More, who wrote that
exploring the subtleties of Scholastic philosophy was “as profitable as milking a he-goat into a sieve.”

We picture the eminent scholars of the time, each in the short jacket favored by the professional classes then, wearing their
distinctive outsized berets, the floppy brims hooding their ears, bowed over desks tilted toward them, pen and ink at hand.
Poring over manuscripts and proofs in several languages, reliving the glories of the ancient past, half lost in the life of
the mind, they were exalted by the awareness that they were rekindling flames extinguished in the glorious past. They cannot
have been unaware of the recognition of their contemporaries. Each was a personage, admired beyond the borders of his own
state, a man of substance in whom his compatriots took pride and a friend and confidant—at least in the first fifth of the
century—of the Roman Catholic hierarchy. The peasant, the tradesman, the ordinary townsman, lacked the feeblest grasp of
the source for the scholars’ fame, and wouldn’t have understood it if told, but he doffed his cap or tugged his forelock in
the presence of such towering humanists as Pico della Mirandola of Florence, the Neapolitan Alessandro Alessandri, Genoa’s
Julius Caesar Scaliger, the French philologist Guillaume Budé, the Spaniard Juan Luis Vives, John Colet and Thomas More in
England, and Erasmus of Rotterdam, doyen of the movement.

T
HEY CONSTITUTED
the Western world’s first community of powerful lay intellectuals since Constantine’s Ecumenical Council in the fourth century
A.D
. Among their strengths was society’s traditional respect for learning. Anti-intellectualism as it later evolved was unknown;
even the incomprehensible jabber of the Latin Mass inspired humility as well as reverence. But beyond that, the humanists
were honored as though they were nobility. Since the beginning of the Renaissance, their status had risen as rulers of states
and principalities singled them out, granting them perquisites reserved for the favored, establishing them as a privileged
class. Ulrich von Hutten, for example, held an imperial appointment in Maximilian’s court, enjoyed the patronage of the elector
of Mainz, and dined frequently with Mainz’s archbishop. Pico della Mirandola was a protégé of both Lorenzo de’ Medici and
the philosopher Marsilio Ficino. Huldrych Zwingli, rector of Zurich, was a formidable political and religious leader, and
so great was Budé’s prestige that Francis I founded a college at his suggestion. Girolamo Aleandro, who taught Greek and held
the office of rector at the University of Paris, served as Vatican librarian, papal nuncio to France, Germany, and the Netherlands,
and, finally, became a cardinal. The Vatican brought Manutius’s son Paulus to Rome as the official Vatican printer; Henry
VIII chose Polydore Vergil, an Italian humanist, as his official historiographer and summoned Juan Luis Vives from Spain to
tutor his daughter. Erasmus, at Cambridge, and Philipp Melanchthon, at Wittenberg, held their chairs as professors of Greek
with royal approval. John Colet’s position as dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral also had royal sanction. And John Skelton, England’s
poet laureate, had served as royal tutor to the future King Henry VIII, with the consequence that Henry, when he mounted the
throne in 1509, was the product of a thorough humanist education.

No humanist rose higher in public life than Sir Thomas More, who, until his fall from royal grace, was as distinguished a
statesman as he was a scholar. During Henry VIII’s early reign More had been appointed undersheriff of London, king’s councillor,
and a judge of the courts of requests. In 1520, when the sovereigns of England and France conferred on the Field of the Cloth
of Gold outside Calais, he served as Henry’s aide. Knighted, he then rose swiftly through a series of royal appointments —
undertreasurer, speaker of the House of Commons, high steward of Oxford and then of Cambridge, chancellor of the Duchy of
Lancaster, and, finally, when he succeeded Cardinal Wolsey, lord chancellor, the foremost living Englishman, after the king,
of his time.