But even if we concede that the monks dominated mediæval society as Symonds paints it, we must not imagine that they were all St. Bernards. Few indeed—the sainted few—were alone able to abstract themselves so completely from this life as to be unconscious of their surroundings. The successive reforms, Clugny, Carthusians, Cistercians, beginning in poverty and ending in wealth and worldly influence, show what sort of men wore the cowl. The monks were not all alike; some were worldly, some were religious, some were scholars, and some were merely indolent. The monastery was a home for the scholar, a refuge for the disconsolate, and an asylum for the disgraced. And a monk might often be a man whose sensibilities, instead of being dull, were more sharply awake than our own to-day. His faith kindled an imagination that brought the next world down into his daily life, and one who is in communion with eternity is an unconscious poet as well as a devotee. Dante’s great poem is just the essence of a thousand years of such visions. Those phases of the Middle Ages farthest removed from our times and our habits of thought are not necessarily sombre. They are gilded with the most alluring light that ever brightened humanity—the hope and vision of immortality.
It has seemed necessary to say this much at least about the ecclesiasticism of the Middle Ages so that we may get a new or at least a more sympathetic point of view as we study its details. Humanity was not in a comatose condition for a thousand years, to wake up one fine day and discover itself again in a Renaissance. Such an idea gives false conceptions of both the Middle Ages and that slow change by which men acquired new interests,—the Renaissance.
What then was the Italian Renaissance? What was its significance and its result? First of all no new birth of the human spirit, as we have been commonly taught, could come after that wonderful twelfth and busy thirteenth centuries. It would sound strange to the wandering jongleur or the vagabond student, whose satirical and jovial songs of the twelfth century we still sing in our student societies, to be told that he had no joy in the world, no insight into its varying moods, no temperament capable of the comprehension of beauty. If any man ever “discovered himself,” surely that keen-witted, freedom-loving scholar, the goliard, was the man, and yet between him and the fall of Constantinople, that commonest date for the Renaissance, there are two hundred years or more. A little study of preceding centuries shows a world brimming with life and great with the promise of modern times. Lawyers were governing in the name of kings; universities were growing in numbers and influence. It has been said, and perhaps it is not far wrong, that there were three great powers in Europe in the Middle Ages—the Church, the Empire, and the University of Paris. And not all the men at the universities of Paris or Oxford or Bologna were busy counting how many angels could dance on the point of a needle, as we are apt to think when we read Lord Bacon’s denunciation of the scholastics. If half of them,—and that is a generous estimate,—were busied over theology, not all that half were examining it for their religious edification. Their interests were scientific. In a way they were scientists,—scientists of the world to come,—not of this transient life. They were analysing theology with about the same attitude of mind as that of the physicist of to-day in spite of all that has been said against their method. When one examines a world which he cannot yet reach, or a providence whose ways are not as the ways of man, he naturally will accept the authority of those whom he believes to be inspired, if he is to make even a little headway into the great unknown. The scholastics stretched the meaning of the word inspired, and accepted authority too easily. But they faced their problem with what seems something like a scientific spirit even if they had not yet attained a scientific method. And I may add in passing that to my mind the greatest tragedy of the human intellect is just here,—in this story of the abused scholastics. Starting out confident that all God’s ways can be comprehended and reduced to definite data, relying in calm security upon the power of the human intellect to comprehend the ways of Divine governance, they were forced point by point, through irreconcilable conclusions and inexplicable points of controversy, to admit that this doctrine and that, this fact and that one, lie outside the realms of reason and must be accepted on faith. Baffled in its vast endeavour to build up a science of things divine the reason of man turned from the task and grappled with the closer problems of the present world. If the work of the scholastics was futile, as so many claim, it was a grand futility that reaches to tragedy. But out of its very futility grew the science of to-day.
And now with all this intellectual activity of which scholasticism is only a part, where did the so-called Renaissance come in? By the year 1300 the problem of the scholastics was finished. In the works of Thomas Aquinas lay codified and systematised the whole positive product of their work. Not until after that was their work empty and frivolous, but when scholasticism turned back upon itself, even the genius of the great Duns Scotus but discovered more and more its futility. Men of culture began to find it distasteful; they did not care to study law,—the other main interest. It was time for a new element in the intellectual realm. The need was no sooner felt than supplied. The study of the antique pagan world afforded scholars and men of leisure the desired change. The discovery of this antique world was not a new process; but the features that had been ignored before, the art and literature of the pagan world, now absorbed all attention. The “humanities” gradually crowded their way into university curricula, especially in Germany and England, and from the sixteenth century to the present day the humanities have been the dominant study at the universities. Looking over the era of the Renaissance, we commonly begin it in the fourteenth century, just where our previous sketch of the other intellectual conditions stopped. The age of Petrarch was its dawn. France and England, where most progress had been made before, were now to be absorbed in the barbarism of international and civil wars; and so the last stage of that long Renaissance which we call the Middle Ages became the task and the glory of Italy.
It may seem at first as if, in exalting the achievements of the Middle Ages, we have undervalued the work of the humanists. It would not be in accord with the attempted scientific judicial attitude which it is now our ambition to attain, if this charge were to be admitted. We must give full credit to the influence of that new knowledge, that new criterion, and especially to that new and healthy criticism which came with the Italian Renaissance. Its work in the world was absolutely necessary if modern society was to take up properly its heritage of all those splendid ages which adorned the Parthenon and made the Forum the centre of the world. All the intellectual energy which had gone into antique society must be made over into our own. But after all, the roots of our society are Teutonic and Christian even more than they are Roman or antique. We must learn to date our modern times not merely from the literary revival which witnessed the recovery of a long-lost pagan past; but from the real and splendid youth of Europe when it grappled with the earnest problems of law and order and put between itself and the Viking days the barriers of the national state,—king and people guarding the highways of the world for the protection of the caravans that made the cities. It is as essential for us to watch those boats that ascended the Rhone and the Rhine, and the merchants whose tents were pitched at the fairs of Champagne, as it is to know who discovered the proper derivation of agnus.