Link to Chronology
Renaissance to WEIRD
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
Continued...
p545 ...In adopting the Latin of the classics as their language, the humanists of the South were bent merely on continuing the work of the ancients; those of the North were eager to indicate, by its adoption, their break with magistri nostri. The barbarous style for which they quite wrongly reproached the Latin of the universities and the Scholastics -- forgetting that it was an artificial and scientific language, perfectly adapted to its purpose -- seemed to them eloquent of the barbarity, crudity, and absurdity of the ideas which it expressed. However they did not undertake to attack the philosophy of the Middle Ages; they were content to despise it. For them, everything had to be reconstructed. Theology must be reconstructed, beginning with the study of the sacred texts. The great achievement of Erasmus was a Greek edition of the New Testament with Latin translation and paraphrase...
When we speak of the rationalism of the Renaissance... The liberty of thought which it claimed for man stopped short of the great religions and philosophical problems. Its standpoint was purely human and terrestrial. It did not attack the problems of destiny and the origin of the world; in this connection it accepted the Christian ideas... It was quite ready to admit the existence of mysterious and demonical powers beyond the limits of the visible world. It is interesting to note that this rationalism coincided with a recrudescence of magical practices, and it uttered no protest against the increasing frequency of the abominable trials for witchcraft, which must never be forgotten if we are to form an accurate notion of the mentality of the new era.
p546 What this rationalism brought with it... was not free thought... but what might be described as an intellectual and moral liberalism. Now liberalism is synonymous with individualism, and... one of the most definite consequences of the Renaissance was that it substituted for the social conceptions of the Middle Ages, according to which the world was a hierarchy of perfectly distinct classes... the idea that worth and esteem are purely personal things, appertaining to every man, by virtue not of his rank, but of his merit. It is interesting to observe that in this connection the Renaissance placed on earth what the Church had reserved for in heaven...
But let us at once admit that the liberalism of the Renaissance was an aristocratic liberalism. By no means did it proclaim the rights of man, but only, in the words of Rabelais, the rights of men who were "free, well born, well educated, and conversant with honest company." In short, its ideal was the vir bonus dicendi peritus of antiquity; that is, the "honnete homme," the "gentleman" of the modern era. It regarded the privileges of birth as absurd, but it insisted, all the more vigorously, on the privileges of intellectual culture. In this its point of view approximated pretty closely to that of antiquity. Regarded in this sense, Rousseau's declaration that the arts and letters were destructive of equality is a protest against society as envisaged by the Renaissance. The opposition between the freeman and the slave was replaced by the opposition between the literate and the illiterate. The Renaissance felt nothing but disdain for "mechanic trades," and the prejudice in favor of the liberal professions, which survives to this day, dates from the Renaissance. The prejudice was doubtless largely responsible for the indifference to the lot of the lower classes which characterizes the modern era. Moral ideas have surely played as much part in this as the economic interests of landowners and capitalists.
The English words "Barbarous" and "barbarian" have been used in ways that I've found confusing in this translation, but you could define "barbarian" as a person who doesn't speak your language. This could mean a 5th century BCE Thracian who didn't speak Attic Greek. It could also mean a 21st century hick who wonders if the Earth might be flat, questions evolution, and would think QED was nonsense if he ever bothered to consider it. Jonathan Haidt's "WEIRD" (Western Educated Industrial Rich and Democratic), simply do not speak the same language as the non-WEIRD -- though it might be more accurate to say that it's the non-WEIRD who don't know the language in question. I may not share this Renaissance attitude toward the work of the lower classes, but I would share the disinterest in spending much time in conversation with them.
p547 ...The organic unity which was lacking in the modern world would... be compensated for by the prodigious animation provoked and maintained by the enfranchisement of thought and action. In order to arrive at a just appreciation of the Renaissance, we must remember that for three hundred years the art and literature of every people have been evolving in the direction which it struck out for itself... One might liken our civilization to a river which became navigable only from the point where the affluent of antiquity mingled its waters with the stream. Of course, the river has its source at a much remoter point, but its upper reaches are accessible only with difficulty; to explore them, to become familiar with their aspect... requires a considerable effort. Barely a century has elapsed since the Middle Ages ceased to be regarded with disdain, but in spite of the reaction which has occurred in their favor, they are so remote from us that we cannot blend them with our own life in a really intimate fashion. More often than not, Neo-Gothicism [Footnote: "The allusion here is to the 'neo-Gothic" architecture which flourished especially in Belgium, before the war."] is merely the form affected by ideas and tendencies which are in reality extremely modern. The Renaissance, on the contrary, still surrounds us on every hand... Despite the admirable vigor of contemporary art, our government continues to maintain their "Ecoles de Rome," their "travelling scholarships," while our Athenaeums, Lyceums and Gymnasiums are merely continuations of the Latin schools of the 16th century. From the Renaissance, too, dates the development of the sciences; for a long time they exerted no influence upon human history, accumulating the new knowledge in silence, until, at the end of the 18th century, the spate of discoveries, increasing our knowledge of Nature, led to a second renaissance of thought, and thanks to the progress of technique, multiplied a hundredfold the output of human effort.
p548 Nevertheless, the influence of the Renaissance upon civilization was by no means so efficacious as its early years might have led man to expect. Another force, even more powerful -- the religious Reformation -- began to clash with it at the very moment when it was beginning to trace the direction of intellectual progress, and it was their twofold action, sometimes combined, but more often opposed, that determined the destinies of the modern world.
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