Link to Chronology
A revolution from above
A History of Europe by Henri Pirenne
University Books, first published 1938 but written during the Great War
Book Nine
The Renaissance and the Reformation
Chapter I
The Transformation of Social Life From the Middle of the Fifteenth Century
3. Ideas and Manners
p536 ...In Italy the new orientation of ideas, manners, and artistic feeling began at the very moment when the economic development of the nation had reached its apogee. It was not contemporary with this development, but subsequent to it, and while the intellectual movement continued to progress the economic development was already beginning to decline. This intellectual development was the fine flower of the entire civilization that preceded it; the product of thought and beauty succeeding to the product of force. This development was not unlike that of ancient Greece in the days of Pericles: Athens in the 4th century, and Florence in the middle of the 15th century, shone with a glory which was no longer commensurate with their real strength; the dazzling radiance which they shed upon the world, before they made way for more vigorous successors, had the splendor but also the ephemeral quality of a sunset. At the very moment when the genius of Machiavelli, Guiccardini, Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci was in flower, the discovery of the New World was diverting the current of European life from the Mediterranean.
I see what he means about Florence but how was Pericles's Athens in decline?
The case was very different to the north of the Alps. Here the Renaissance was not a sunset but a sunrise... it must not be believed that capitalism provoked the renaissance of thought which was contemporaneous with it. The one and the other were different symptoms of the same crisis of growth... What the discovery of the New World was for capitalism, the Italian Renaissance was for the intellectual movement...
p537 ...The relaxation of morals in the 15th century, and the predominance of temporal interests, were no less striking in Northern Europe than in Italy... The Low Countries, under the Dukes of Burgundy, between France and England, the one exhausted by war and the other a prey to civil discord, were enjoying a period of peace and prosperity, and they afforded a spectacle which presented curious analogies with that of Italy. One might have observed, at the court, in the society of the great nobles, and among the government officials and the capitalists, whether landowners or merchants, a kind of life whose principal features were precisely those which are commonly attributed to the early Renaissance in Tuscany and Lombardy: a general relaxation of morality, a love of luxury and social festivities, a demand for elegance and comfort in private dwellings, a pronounced taste for fine clothing, and for the nobler pleasures of art, and the general diffusion of education and good breeding. Here... we see that the aristocracy of birth, like the aristocracy of wealth, was living a social life of a kind that no longer had anything in common with the conventional cortesia of the Middle Ages... it is enough to recall the adorable landscapes which assuredly contributed to the success of the Belgian school of painting in the 15th century in order to realize that the discovery of Nature at this period was by no means a purely Italian discovery. The same may be said of the discovery of the individual...
p539 This worldliness of manners and of thought in and about the court of Burgundy was also to be observed, though in a less degree, in France and England... What were the first books to be printed? When Caxton established his printing-press in London, his customers, who consisted for the most part of noblemen, but also included a city haberdasher, asked him to produce translations from the French and Latin. He himself translated the Aenid... The printing-press did not create the taste for reading, for that already existed, but it hastened its diffusion... the great difference between the 15th century and the age of Charlemagne and the Middle Ages was that the culture which men of the 15th century acquired by reading was purely secular. The Church had no part in it...
p540 We cannot doubt that in all these people [Edward IV, Richard III, Louis XI, the Dukes of Burgundy and others] there was an insatiable thirst for learning: an awakening -- unconscious, I believe, but none the less an awakening [what??!] -- of curiosity, eager to see beyond the two narrow frontiers within which the traditions of caste and religion had hitherto imprisoned it...
p541 ...The "New Learning," as the English called it, was a direct return to antiquity, provoked, of course, by the example of the humanists, but not subordinated to them. It is true that there had been humanists in the North, and especially poets, like Pierre Gilles and the author of the Basia, Jean Second, while the Certamen poeticum Haftianum of Amsterdam was in the direct line of descent. Longolium of Malines belonged to the same school. But not so the great writers: neither Roechlin in Germany, nor Colet [John?] and More in England, nor the greatest of all, Erasmus. The literature of antiquity influenced them less by its form than by enfranchising their thought. It enfranchised it from the scholastic tradition, not only by means of the classic tongue, which they immediately adopted, but by the new standpoint which it gave them. The Miles Christianus of Erasmus might be described as their programme. And what do we find in it? The secular spirit!... religion is envisioned as an exhortation to morality, addressed to the honest man. The ideal is no longer asceticism, but the life of the citizen, with all its duties... hence... a whole plan of reforms, with a view to the future, and especially pedagogic reforms, which would replace the schools of the clergy by new schools, in which children should be educated in the cult of belles lettres, and in which "politesse" would have its place in a training which was to prepare the pupil no for the cloister, but for life. The Adagia of Erasmus, which appeared in 1500, exercised a pedagogical influence comparable only to that of Rousseau's Emile. For the first time... it was seen that the function of the school was to impart intellectual culture. One may say that the whole organization of education to this day is based on the conception of education evolved by these northern humanists. For them, the object of education was the free development of the personality... More, like Erasmus, was opposed to monasticism, asceticism, the celibacy of priests, and the worship of relics; and both, if the truth be told, tended to transform Christianity into a philosophia evangelica... in the North the spirit of the Renaissance was revolutionary, but it was purely theoretical... It made war upon the Church. It spared the State, hoping that the progress of enlightenment would win acceptation [?] for its opinions.
p543 In return, all the social authorities made much of the humanists, just as they made much of the philosophers before the French Revolution... In their optimism they believed that the world might be changed. Vives wanted the Utopia to be placed in the hands of schoolboys, together with the Colloquia. If governments, and even popes and kings, applauded these books, as did all the high officials also, it was because they were careful to avoid political discussion. Their attitude was precisely that of Voltaire. In order that enlightenment should triumph, they had need of a strong government, an authority superior to the parties, more powerful than the Church. Like all intellectuals, they were, though they did not confess it, in favor of the "intelligent despot." The revolution of which they dreamed was to be carried out from above, because they expected that it would be the work essentially of science and reason. No doubt they wanted to extend its benefits to all men, but it must begin at the top, and as for the means by which it was to be brought about, they relied on the social aristocracy, hoping for the final constitution of an intellectual aristocracy...
p544 Everywhere... [but Spain], during the twenty years which elapsed between the end of the 15th century and the appearance of Protestantism, it seemed as though a new world was on the point of birth. All that was strong and youthful and vigorous revolted against the past. Never, perhaps, have the social authorities so unanimously supported an intellectual movement... All were moving and straining in the same direction: authority, society, fashion, the politicians, the women, the artists, the humanists. There was a boundless confidence abroad, a feverish joy. The mind was liberated from authority, was free to wander under the heavens; the monopoly of knowledge was abolished, and it was now the possession of the whole community. And the knowledge that was derived from antiquity was all the more seductive, inasmuch as it went hand in hand with beauty, and was, so to speak, almost identical with beauty.
This would be more convincing if we hadn't just read about the Hussite Wars in Bohemia, almost exactly a century before. I'm sure Pirenne is correct about how Erasmus and his friends felt, but notice that you will not find the common man in the list above of social factions all straining in the same direction.
Continued next time.
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