What follows has been excerpted from the introductory lecture for a course I have taught at U of T’s School of Continuing Studies on the literature and philosophy of the Renaissance…
For the next few minutes, I am obliged to address the question of the defining nature of the Renaissance, on which historians of every subsequent generation down to our own have spilled seas of ink. Of course, there is an antecedent question–whether there was a Renaissance–, which is surely more than merely academic.
About the only thing that historians agree on is that the Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteen centuries was neither unique nor unprecedented. That is, there have been innumerable efflorescences of civilizational and cultural brilliance throughout human history, and almost every one of them can be (and has been) conceived as a revival or rebirth of some antecedent “golden age”. Indeed, the remarkable fact about civilization–at least until relatively recently–is its more or less unbroken continuity.
If we regard the period from about 500 to 330 B.C. in ancient Greece—the classical period so-called—as the earliest golden age of literature and philosophy, then the three centuries in the Graeco-Roman world from around 100 B.C. to 200 A.D. surely represents the first “renaissance”, with Virgil’s Aeneid, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and Statius’ Thebaid as eminently worthy re-assertions of the Homeric ethos, and with Varro, Lucretius, Cicero, Seneca, Plutarch, Philo, Apuleius, and Epictetus as the leading lights of the second, third, or fourth periods of the ancient Athenian schools of Platonism, Epicureanism, and Stoicism.
Of the aforementioned Platonist revival (Middle Platonism, as the historians of philosophy call it), there was another fecundated in turn by the philosopher Plotinus, c. 200, the founder of Neoplatonism, whose disciples Porphyry, Iamblichus, Chalcidius, Proclus, Macrobius, and Julian carried on the Platonic tradition until the end of the 5th century. The same Roman imperial period, from c. 150 A.D. to the fall of the Empire, gave birth to the first golden age of Christian patristic literature, whose authors included Irenaeus, Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Clement and Origen of Alexandria, Hippolytus, Jerome, Ambrose, Eusebius, Lactantius, Augustine, Athanasius, Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory Nazianzus, St. Basil, and St. John Chrysostom, to name only a few off the top of my head. And since the early Christian apologists and Fathers of the Church were, by education and sympathy, learned enthusiasts of Graeco-Roman literature and philosophy, Christianity itself can be aptly described as a great reawakening and reassertion of antique modes of expression and thought.
Which brings me in my Mel Brooks history of the world to the fall of Rome, which is usually described as inaugurating a great “Dark Age” in human history, in which the barbarian hordes descended–as they seem always to have done, according to the experts–from the steppes of Russia, westward across Europe, and in their wake, extinguished the light of civilization for centuries to come. But any serious student of Western literature and ideas can only regard this as a grossly uncritical caricature.
Once again off the top of my head, I can think of any number of brilliant writers and thinkers who from c. 400-700 A.D. produced works that were seminal for the development of Western thought and culture throughout both the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Amongst the pagans: the Commentary on Cicero’s Dream of Scipio and Saturnalia, written c. 400, by the polymath Macrobius; around the same time, Servius’ seminal Commentary on Virgil’s Aeneid; and in the mid-fifth century, Martianus Capella’s On the Marriage of Mercury and Philology (an allegorical exposition of the seven liberal arts), which established the foundation of the medieval and Renaissance school curriculum.
Amongst the Christians, Cassiodorus produced his pedagogical classic, The Institutes of Divine and Secular Letters, in the early 5th century. Another “obscure” late-Roman senator, Boethius, wrote his Consolation of Philosophy (arguably the single most influential work in the history of the Christian West) c. 525. Around the same time, the African bishop Fulgentius composed commentaries on Virgil’s Aeneid, Statius’ Thebaid, and classical mythology in general, inaugurating the medieval Christian tradition of mythography and allegorical commentary on the classics that also persisted down the centuries to the Renaissance (and one of whose most important examples is our first Renaissance text, Boccaccio’s Genealogia Deorum, widely used as an iconographical manual by Renaissance poets and painters alike.) Also amongst the Christian authors of this so-called “Dark Age” is the Pseudo Dionysus, c. 500, whose writings are the seminal authorities on angelology, negative theology, and Neoplatonist Christian mysticism, without which, as we’ll see, there would have been be no Renaissance to speak of.
The Dark Age gloom was also ubiquitously dispelled by the light of St. Benedict of Nursia, founder (c. 525) of the abbey at Monte Cassino, and the Europe-wide Benedictine monastic order. C. 600, came the Moralia on Job and Dialogues of St. Gregory the Great; c. 625, St. Isidore of Seville wrote his exhaustive Allegoriae on the books of the Old and New Testaments, as well as his Etymologies, which gave birth to the important encyclopaedic tradition in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. I might mention in passing that Justinian built Hagia Sophia in Constantinople and San Vitale in Ravenna in the middle of the 6th century.
I don’t intend to go in this way for very much longer; the only purpose of this roll call of names and dates is to persuade you that pronouncements of the death of civilization are often greatly exaggerated—even if I make my own, and insist that ours has been on life-support since the Sixties.
Of course, this has hardly prevented historians from speaking again of a great intellectual renaissance–following this soi-disant “Dark Age”–centered at the court of Charlemagne in the 8th century. And though I could provide another list of brilliant writers and thinkers from the 9th, 10th, and 11th centuries, we hear, all the same, of yet another European reawakening in 12th.
That century, as you know, saw the building of the great cathedrals, in both the Romanesque and the new Gothic styles; this was the period in which the first European universities were founded, at Bologna, Padua, and Paris, and the earliest theological compendia (forerunners of the summas of the next century) were written by Abelard and Peter Lombard. And just as the Renaissance with a capital R was catalyzed by the new Platonic Academy founded by Cosimo de Medici at Florence in the early fifteenth century, so the renaissance of the 12th was inspired by a revival of Platonist thought and classical learning at Chartres, whose acolytes included such humanist poets and philosophers as Bernardus Silvestris, William of Conches, Alain of Lille, and John of Salisbury.
Nor can anyone describe the 13th or 14th century as anything but a fecund period in literature and thought across Europe. This was the age of Scholasticism (of Albert the Great, St. Thomas Aquinas, Ockham, St. Bonaventure, Bacon), as well as the founding of the Franciscan and Dominican mendicant orders. In literature, the 14th century gave us four of the world’s most celebrated poets: Chaucer in England, and Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio in Italy.
In short, the idea that, with the first glimmerings of the Renaissance in Italy in the early 15th century, the world suddenly awoke from a sleep of medieval superstition, ignorance, and illiteracy, is one of the most ludicrous, though unfortunately widespread, misconceptions in the long and fecund history of academic stupidity.
The Renaissance per se may well have been the greatest, but it was certainly not the only reawakening of intellectual and cultural brilliance in European history–assuming, that is, that there was ever a time in the last three millennia in which European civilization could be described as having fallen into somnolence. But this is only the grossest of the many errors that riddle the popular image of our period.
If we understand from the word itself that the period from 1400 to 1600 was characterized by a great rebirth of some earlier epoch of genius, then we must define somewhat more precisely just what it was that was reborn. To this, intellectual historians have given many answers.
The first and vaguest is that the Renaissance revived the culture and spirit of classical antiquity. Like all simplifications, this is true as far as it goes. In defending the idea that there was a Renaissance, and that it represented a distinct break with the ethos of the Middle Ages that preceded it, the eminent art historian Erwin Panofsky pointed out that the churches and palaces built in 15th and 16th century Italy by Brunelleschi, Alberti, Bramante, Sangallo, and Palladio, looked a good deal more like the Pantheon in Rome, which had been constructed a millennium and a half earlier, than the castles and cathedrals erected there as recently as a century before.
And indeed, there is no doubt whatsoever that the Renaissance architects repudiated the medieval styles, renewing instead those classical Greek and Roman idioms—the basilica floor plan, the pedimented temple facade, the Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian column and entablature, the arcade and loggia, barrel vault and dome, the mosaics, frescoes, and polychrome marble decorations—which had so inspired them, in part as a result of the spate of archaeological discoveries that were taking place at the time in Italy and elsewhere throughout the lands of the former Graeco-Roman world. In painting and sculpture, besides, one can see that the art of the Renaissance resurrected the carefully observed, naturalistic realism of classical antiquity.
Whether this antique naturalism in the plastic arts is the defining trait of the Renaissance—given that the sculptured human figures on the façade of the late-12th, 13th, and 14th century Gothic cathedrals in France, for example, are as naturalistic and verisimilar as any in the history of art—whether this naturalism is in any meaningful sense new, that is, is a question that needn’t detain us.
What is more problematic is that it is invariably ascribed by art historians to a re-valuation in the Renaissance, under the inspiration, once again, of classical antiquity, of the sensual beauty of the human form, and more generally of the material, earthly order, which had been neglected or condemned during that long medieval night of sin-laden gloom, transcendental hocus-pocus, and contempt for the flesh and the world.
Here, again, I’m afraid, we are in the realm of historical revisionism, which is, as usual, a projection of our own modern, materialistic and secular prejudices. This view is risible from both ends: first, insofar as the philosophy and theology of classical antiquity were no less scornful of the transitory goods and pleasures of the sensible, corporeal order than medieval Christianity—unless, that is, your conception of antiquity is drawn from those hackneyed scenes in bad Hollywood movies depicting the Roman emperors and their courtiers reclining on couches, gorging on roast boar, and having their grapes peeled by scantily clad slave girls. Conversely, the society and world-view of the Renaissance itself remained overwhelmingly Christian and otherworldly. As we will see in due course, Renaissance poets, artists, philosophers, and theologians were no less convinced than the medieval mystics that truth and reality reside preeminently in the Divine realm, amongst what Plato called the world of Ideas, and Paul, the invisibilia Dei.
A related claim is made about the Renaissance’s renewal of interest in the rational, objective investigation of nature, which was once again resumed from antiquity after a medieval interregnum of Christian hostility to reason and science, and a metaphysical disinterest in the material realm. Here too, this is at best a half-truth.
There is no doubt, of course, that in the Renaissance great advances were made in physics, astronomy, optics, and especially geography and cartography (as a result of the great voyages of discovery that exploded medieval assumptions about the frontiers of the known world). But some of these at least can be attributed to normal, incremental advances in human knowledge and technology—the invention of the compass and the telescope, above all–rather than any abrupt moral or intellectual tergiversation. And in any case, in the high Middle Ages, the empirical researches of Albert the Great, Roger Bacon, and many others, evince no lack of interest in the rational, scientific workings of nature and the cosmos, while the veneration by the medieval Scholastics of Aristotle (known by them, simply, as “The Philosopher”), hardly suggests a contempt for the natural order.
On this theme much has been written about the impetus given to scientific research in the Renaissance by the re-discovery of the lost works of Aristotle, the author of the Physics and the great taxonomist of biological species (the Greek, in short, who had his feet planted firmly on the ground). The only problem with this modern aetiological myth is that the re-entry into the West of the works of Aristotle (or rather, Latin translations of the works of Aristotle), pre-dated the Renaissance by at least a century and a half, having begun at the outset of the 13th century.
In fact, it was the repudiation of Aristotelianism (by such as Petrarch in the 14th century and Nicolas of Cusa in the early 15th) that paved the way for the great Platonist revival in Renaissance Florence, where the dialogues of Plato, the entire corpus of the pagan Neoplatonists (Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, and Proclus, including their theurgic manuals), the occult writings of the Hermetic tradition (along with the Sibylline Oracles, the Chaldaean Oracles, the Cabbala, and the Orphic Hymns), and the mystical treatises of the Pseudo-Dionysius, were, for the first time, translated into Latin at the Medici court by Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, and Cristoforo Landino.
Indeed, the Renaissance can be justly described as another, and undoubtedly the greatest of the rebirths of Platonist thought, conjoined as it was with a muscular rejection of the semantic hair-splitting that characterized an exhausted Scholasticism in thrall to Aristotle in general and Aristotelian logic in particular. But the intellectual superannuation of Aristotle, the exaltation of the divine Plato, and the re-validation of pagan occultism and magic, hardly accord with the popular view of the Renaissance as a “rational”, “secular”, “scientific” age in revolt against medieval mysticism and otherworldliness.
Having tried to dispel some of these popular misconceptions, let me now venture something in the affirmative about the nature of our period. In this endeavour, it’s safest, I think, to allow the writers of the Renaissance speak for themselves.
There is no doubt that they were convinced that they lived in an epoch of unprecedented genius, and even if their assessment of the distinctive preoccupations and achievements of the time in which they lived were necessarily exaggerated, their accounts are no more self-serving than those of modern historians who, as I’ve said, have never been able to resist the temptation to project upon the Renaissance their own triumphalist modernist prejudices and presuppositions.
I’ve distributed a number of short texts on this theme, which I hope you will have time to read at some point. Collectively, they proclaim the Renaissance as a “new golden age” of scholarship, literature, art, and thought, so brilliant that, as Erasmus exults, he “could almost wish to be young again”.
The longest selection, entitled by our editor “The Excellence of This Age”, comes c. 1575 from the pen of the French scholar and humanist Louis Le Roy. In it, Le Roy proposes to show that the state of learning is more exalted in his time than at any previous period in history. To this end, he adduces the restoration of the languages and literature of antiquity, enumerates practically all of the human sciences, arts, industries, and departments of knowledge–which, though hitherto almost extinct, have now advanced beyond man’s wildest expectations–, and concludes:
Theology, moreover, the most worthy of all, which seemed to be destroyed by the sophists [i.e., the Scholastics], has been greatly illuminated by the knowledge of Hebrew and Greek; and the early fathers of the Church, who were languishing in the libraries, have been brought to light.
Here then, the renewal of interest in the Fathers, whose partial neglect was another defect of Scholasticism, hardly supports the modern stereotype of the Renaissance as a renunciation of Christianity and reassertion of the supposedly worldly ethos of ancient paganism. The study of Hebrew and Greek, the original languages of Scripture, was surely a defining glory of Renaissance scholarship. These languages were well known to the early Fathers, including Jerome, who consulted both the original Hebrew and the Greek of the Septuagint in the making of his famous Latin translation of the Bible, the Vulgate. (But Hebrew, and even Greek, were no longer obligatory disciplines in the curricula of the Latin West.) As Erasmus makes clear in one of his letters, the study of the scriptural languages was part of a general dedication to biblical scholarship that included the re-establishment of the biblical text, which was thought to have been corrupted over the centuries of copying, interpolation, and mistranslation. In this enterprise, Erasmus mentions the great French scholar Jacques Lefevre d’Etaples, whose translation into French of the entire Christian Bible was completed in 1530.
The study of Hebrew in conjunction with the exposition of the Old Testament was the preoccupation of some of the most famous men of letters in that golden age: the aforementioned Lefevre in France, Reuchlin in Germany, Erasmus in the Netherlands, and Pico in Italy. Most notably, in the case of Reuchlin, Pico, Agrippa von Nettesheim, Leo Ebreo Giordano Bruno, Paracelsus, and innumerable others, the revival of Hebrew and other oriental languages soon fecundated a rampant fascination with the Cabbala.
But the study of Cabbala was only one manifestation of a more general obsession with the occult in the Renaissance: with the supposedly immemorial Egyptian wisdom of the so-called Thrice-Great Hermes, with Pythagoreo-Orphism, Zoroastrianism, Chaldaean astrology, alchemy, the angelology of the Pseudo-Dionsysius, and other forms of mysticism, theurgy, and magic, the fascination with which pressed hard on the edge of an all-out craze, and which once again rather invidiates the presumptive rejection by the age of medieval supernaturalism and religiosity.
If the revival of Hebrew led to a renewed interest in these ancient esoteric traditions, even more so did the revival of Greek. Greek, of course, continued to be the language of the Byzantine East, but as Le Roy and Erasmus explain, it was only with the migration into Italy during the 14th and 15th centuries of such great Byzantine scholars as Bessarion, Theodore of Gaza, George of Trebizon, and especially the Platonist master Pletho–fleeing as they were the incursions of Muslim crusaders ahead of the eventual conquest and destruction of Constantinople in 1453–, that Greek manuscripts began to be imported into western Europe; that scholars from Italy in turn were sent throughout Greece and Byzantium in search of them; that libraries of these manuscripts began to be assembled at the Italian courts; and that the study of Greek authors and their translation into Latin began in earnest.
By far the most monumental of these acts of recovery and translation was that accomplished for the works of Plato at the Medici court in Florence by the founder and first scholarch of the so-called Florentine Academy, Marsilio Ficino. In the Middle Ages, the only dialogue of Plato known widely in the West was the Timaeus, in the Latin translation and commentary of the 4th-century pagan Neoplatonist Chalcidius. Ficino not only translated into Latin and wrote commentaries on most of the dialogues, but also translated and commented upon the works of the principle pagan Neoplatonists Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, and Proclus, the entire Hermetic Corpus, the Orphic Hymns, the Chaldaean Oracles, and the four major works of the Neoplatonist Christian Pseudo-Dionsysius.
Finally, along with Greek, all of the Renaissance authorities rejoice in the revival of good Latin style, the usage of which was said to have descended, after the Fall of Rome, into a state of barbarism. Leonardo Bruni gives especial credit to Petrarch in this regard, as well as for his devotion to and promotion of the works of Cicero (the principle conduit of Platonism for the medieval West, and the paragon of Latin eloquence). As Le Roy notes, after Petrarch the reclamation of good Latin style, and the accompanying study of grammar, rhetoric, and oratory in the ancient handbooks of Cicero and Quintilian, continued to be pursued by such famous Renaissance scholars and poets as Boccaccio, Bruni, Lorenzo Valla, and Pietro Bembo (author of the Renaissance classic The Courtier, with its seminal re-statement of the Platonic doctrine of divine love from the Symposium).