Renaissance Literature Review Assignment

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PHD VERIFIED

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The Medieval Synthesis and the Discovery of Man: The Renaissance

When all is said and done, it can be argued that the Renaissance of the 14th and 15th centuries was not indicative of an extraordinary intellectual event or movement. The 12th century Renaissance, characterized as it was by the by the spirit of inquiry and skepticism of Peter Abelard (see Lecture 1), is much more deserving of that label.

And when we think of the Renaissance today, we perhaps think of tangible images like sculpture, painting and architecture. We may even think of the de Medici, that powerful Italian family of bankers and purveyors of political intrigue.

We may even think of the exploration of the New World and the exploitation of that world. Or perhaps we may focus our recollection on the perfection of moveable type by a German print master by the name of Gutenberg.

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Why did the Renaissance occur? This is a difficult question at best — there are no easy answers. In general, however, we could argue that the ordered, formalistic, and compartmentalized society of the Middle Ages allowed those forces which had created it to destroy it as well.

These forces developed to such an extent that they outgrew the fixed and narrow framework through which they functioned. In other words, the medieval matrix held the seeds of its own decline.

Realities such as a surplus of agricultural produce, the increasing urbanization of Europe, a swelling population, wider trading zones and a thirst for knowledge finally broke the stranglehold of the medieval matrix. Man emerged from the fragments of the medieval synthesis and saw, perhaps for the first time since the classical age of Greece, the world of Man and the world of Nature.

By 1500 and in whatever field of endeavor we choose to examine — art, politics, science, economics, life — there is greater emphasis placed on human potentiality for growth and excellence. The new world view — at least part of it — would be fashioned according to the reigning two ideals of the period: individuality and self-sufficiency.

The Renaissance was clearly marked by vast economic changes. Although Europe was slow to recover from the ravages of the Black Death between 1347 and 1351, by the middle of the fifteenth century, finance, commerce, agriculture and industry were all on the upswing. Commerce demanded a money economy in place of the older barter system.

And the restrictive practices of the guild system, at least in western Europe, were already showing signs of breakdown. All of this, of course, would be supported by the massive influx of gold and silver bullion into Europe which the eventual exploitation of the world across the Atlantic would make possible in the early 16th century.

Kings and their nobility, of course, grew wealthier. But on a comparative level, it was the city-dwelling merchant whose wealth grew even more. Italy, Germany, the Low Countries and in England were the main beneficiaries of the wealth that flowed into Europe during the first wave of overseas empire.

Bankers financed mines, manufacturing and sheep-raising and the great merchants began to move beyond the confines of the medieval guild system. Commerce sought new markets in North and South America and India.

This rapid growth in the economy and in centralized government was especially marked in western Europe, the Low Countries and in England and was indicative of a general transformation of numerous existing social institutions. A thoroughgoing intellectual reconstruction was now a reality.

Every new belief medieval man and woman adopted had to be worked out by individuals living in this society. And there were numerous forces at work which allowed individuals to construct radically new aspirations. The new interest focused on man and his life in the here and now.

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While many retained their faith in life after death — indeed, most people did so — there was a coincident desire to enjoy the benefits of this world now. St. Augustine (354-430) would have been most disappointed. If his artificial dichotomy of the Two Worlds meant anything, it was that the City of God was superior in all ways to the City of Man.

It was nearly a coincidence that those individuals who felt these interests the most had an ancient literature to which they could turn and find purpose. In Greece and Rome — especially the Greece and Rome of Plato (c.427-c.347) and Cicero (106-43) — the Renaissance found its conscience.

There in the classical world they found people who had the same passion for a free life in the world of Nature. The Renaissance passion for what was human and the discovery or rediscovery of this same inclination in the classical world we today call HUMANISM. Christianity had spent the past fourteen centuries erasing this pagan and secular concern among its flock.

Although the Church Fathers had to read and understand this pagan literature, they at the same time rejected its message. Or did they? Was it really possible for them to have not paid any attention to the content of what they read while they were seeking to improve the style of their writing? I think not.

And as much as the fathers may have complained about the paganism of the ancients, the ideas implicit within the ancient works became part of their thinking. In this way, classical humanism more or less slipped through the back door of medieval Christian literature.

Throughout the central and high Middle Ages, we can discern a literature which abounds in the frank enjoyment of life and its pleasures. The verse of the GOLIARDS is one such example. The troubadours and wandering scholars, of course, were roundly condemned by the stern St. Dominic and Pope Innocent III went on to lead a Holy Crusade to stamp out the Cathari as well as the Goliards.

And although Thomas Aquinas was certainly no pagan and clearly no devotee of the Goliards, it is also clear that he embraced his own brand of humanism. Aquinas was no ascetic in the mold of Augustine. Citified intellectual that he was, he did not deny himself the pleasures of earthly existence. His entire philosophy was grounded in the supremacy of that most human of man’s qualities — Human Reason.

With the Renaissance, Europe learned from its past and borrowed what was deemed most useful. Of course, why the Renaissance had to go back to the past to find what was useful for the present is important. Why is it that this forward-looking age, this period of rebirth and rediscovery, needed to justify itself according to ancient models?

I think the answer is quite simple: in order to escape the present — “shameful vision this. We must awake or die” — Renaissance humanists had to find a precedent elsewhere. The present disappointed them. The key to the present and the future then, lay in the virtues of the golden age of the classical world.

Dante was as full of models from the ancient world as he was of the late 13th and early 14th century. When he died in 1321, the father of the Italian Renaissance, Francesco Petrarcha (1304-1374), had just reached his seventeenth birthday.

The great Petrarch, symbol of all that was the Italian Renaissance, would cast Aristotle aside. Scholasticism, that great medieval combination of Theology and Philosophy, was also abandoned by Petrarch.

“How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” asked the medieval Scholastic. We can only imagine Petrarch’s response — “who cares?” he might have said. Petrarch was more interested in the glories of this world. But he looked backward, and found in Cicero a lamentation for the present. In other words, the meaning of the Renaissance came from the classical past.

Petrarch himself was impressed with the ancients. “Among the many subjects which interested me,” he wrote in his Letter to Posterity, “I dwelt especially upon antiquity, for our own age has always repelled me…. In order to forget my own time, I have constantly striven to place myself in a spirit of other ages, and consequently, I delight in history.” So, Petrarch turned from Aristotle to Plato. But why? Well, simple. Plato was not Aristotle. The lyrical, poetic, soulful Plato was the antithesis of the logical, scientific, unemotional Aristotle. Plato was not only the antithesis of Aristotle; he was the antidote to Aristotle.

Beyond Cicero and other writers of the classical age there lay another world for thinkers like Petrarch. There was the world of Florence — a city where science and philosophy were joined together. Florence — a city like no other. One hundred years after Petrarch’s death we find another Renaissance humanist, Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), extolling the virtues of that city. In 1492, Ficino sent a letter to one of his friends. The letter’s message is clear. It is a Renaissance document without question.

If we are to call any age golden, it is beyond doubt that age which brings forth golden talents in different places. That such is true of this our age [no one] will hardly doubt.

For this century, like a golden age, has restored to light the liberal arts, which were almost extinct: grammar, poetry, rhetoric, painting, sculpture, architecture, music . . . and all this in Florence.

Achieving what had been honored among the ancients, but almost forgotten since, the age has joined wisdom with eloquence, and prudence with the military art. . . . This century appears to have perfected astronomy, in Florence it has recalled the Platonic teaching from darkness into light . . . and in Germany . . . [there] have been invented the instruments for printing books.

Petrarch and Ficino were urban representatives of the very urban phenomenon we call the Renaissance. Their lives are ones of spiritual adventure and a thirst for knowledge. This thirst, the product of the 12th Century Renaissance, had become more generalized — its tentacles had spread across Europe, touching men and women who were eager for knowledge of any kind.