R. Nisbet Bain - The Cambridge Modern History

The medieval fortunes of the Latin classics differed widely from those of the Greek. The classical Latin language and literature were never wholly lost. But, after the fifth century, a knowledge of classical Greek rapidly faded out of the West, until it became practically extinct. Between the fall of the Western Empire and the Renaissance, no general provision for teaching Greek existed in the West, similar to that which was made in regard to Latin. Charles the Great wished, indeed, to restore Greek, mainly for the practical purpose of intercourse with the East. One of the Capitularies attests his design (“ Graecas et Latinos scholas in perpetuum manere ardinavimus”); but it is doubtful whether his purpose was anywhere fulfilled. Some study of Greek was fostered, as we have seen, in the Irish monasteries; and a few instances of it occur in other places. Thus in the tenth century Greek was studied by some brethren of the Abbey of St Gall. The Council of Vienne (1311) had proposed to establish chairs of Greek in several cities of Europe; but nothing was done. Several eminent men of western Europe, in the course of those centuries, certainly possessed some knowledge of Greek, though it is often difficult to say how much. After the schism between the Eastern and Western Churches, sporadic settlements of Greeks occurred in the West, especially in France; and Latin controversialists had a new motive for acquiring the language of their opponents. Grosseteste, according to Matthew Paris, was aided by a Greek priest of St Albans in translating the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs into Latin. The Benedictine historians give lists of the persons in each century who were reputed to know Greek; but it may well be that these lists, short though they are, include men who had merely gained some slight knowledge of the language from intercourse with Greeks. In Italy, doubtless, the number of those who knew some Greek was larger than elsewhere, owing to the greater closeness of Italy’s relations with the East. But even at Constantinople itself, in the fourteenth century, a sound knowledge of ancient Greek was confined to a narrow circle; and an intelligent appreciation of the ancient Hellenic literature was probably rarer still.

Enough has been said to guard against the notion that the Italian revival of learning wa’s something more sudden and abrupt than it actually was. The movement in the second half of the fourteenth century would appear almost miraculous, if the new light were supposed to have flashed upon Italy, at Petrarch’s word, from a background of utter darkness. The fact is rather that the dawn had long been growing in the sky. On the other hand, the revival which dates from Petrarch was, in a very definite sense, the beginning of a new era. The appreciation of classical antiquity which came with it differed in two respects from any which the earlier Middle Ages could show. In the first place, the excellence of literary form exhibited by the ancient masters of Latin style now became a direct object of study and of imitation. Such portions of these authors as had been read in the period preceding the Renaissance had been valued chiefly for the facts, or sentiments, or supposed allegorical meanings, which could be drawn from them; they were, as a rule, but dimly apprehended as literature, and had very little influence on the medieval writing of Latin. The second difference was still more important. Ancient literature was now welcomed, not only as supplying standards of form, but as disclosing a new conception of life; a conception freer, larger, more rational, and more joyous, than the medieval; one which gave unfettered scope to the play of the human feelings, to the sense of beauty, and to all the activities of the intellect. Ancient Latin writers used the word humanitas to denote the civilising and refining influence of polite letters and of the liberal arts; as they also applied the epithet humanus to a character which had received that influence. The Italian scholars of the Renaissance, to whom the classical literature of antiquity was not merely a model, but a culture, and, indeed, a life, found it natural to employ a phrase not used by the ancients, and to speak of Utterae humanae or Utterae humaniores; meaning by the comparative, not “secular rather than theological,” but “distinctively humane”; more so, that is, than other literature. The “humanist,” a term already known to Ariosto, is the student of humane letters. A man like John of Salisbury, imbued with the loving study of good Latin classics, or even a man like Gerbert, whose genius gave almost a foretaste of the revival, was still divided by a broad and deep gulf from the Italian humanist of the age opened by Petrarch. Medieval orthodoxy would have recoiled from that view of human life, and especially from that claim of absolute liberty for the reason, which formed part of the humanist’s ideal. Indeed we are continually reminded, throughout the course of the Italian Renaissance, that the new movement has medieval forces to combat or to reconcile. It is only some of the clearer and stronger spirits, in that time of transition, that thoroughly succeed in harmonising Christian teaching with a full acceptance of the New Learning.

Francesco Petrarca (1304-74),—who thus modified, for euphony’s sake, his surname Petracco,—was born at Arezzo. He was nine years old when his father settled at Avignon, the seat, since 1309, of the Papacy. At Avignon Petrarch passed his boyhood,—already charmed, at school, by Cicero’s periods; and there, when he was twenty-three, he saw in a church the Laura of his sonnets. The central interest of his life, from an early age, was in the classical past of Italy. He longed to see the ancient glories of Rome revived. Twice, in poetical epistles, he adjured Benedict XII to quit the “Babylon” on the Rhone for the city on the Tiber. In 1336, when he saw Rome for the first time, he was impressed by the contrast between the grandeur of the decaying monuments and the squalor of their medieval surroundings. Then he spent some years in his beautiful retreat at Vaucluse, near Avignon, brooding on Roman history. There he began a Latin epic, Africa, with Scipio Africanus for its hero, a poem which slowly grew under his hands, but was never completed; tame in parts, and lacking Virgilian finish, yet full of powerful and musical lines. But it was chiefly, if not wholly, his Canzoniere,—where he had reached absolute perfection within a limited sphere,—that won him the honour of being crowned with the laurel on the Capitol at Rome (1341, net. 37). Thenceforth he was recognised as the foremost man of letters in Europe. When, in May, 1347, Rienzi was proclaimed head of “the Holy Roman Republic,” Petrarch hailed the “tribune” as a heaven-sent deliverer, who was to rid Italy of the “foreign tyrants,” as humanism loved to style the feudal nobles. With many of these “tyrants,” such as the Colonnesi and the Visconti, Petrarch lived, then and afterwards, on terms of much cordiality and reciprocal advantage. Patriotic archaeology had inspired that crazy scheme of restoring the Roman Commonwealth. But the same enthusiasm for classical antiquity made Petrarch the leader in a solid and permanent restoration of literature.

He was steeped in the life, the thoughts, and the emotions of the Latin classics. His way of using them might be contrasted with Dante’s in the De Monarchia. To Petrarch they were real men, his Italian ancestors. He was the first who zealously collected Latin manuscripts, inscriptions, and coins. He was the first typical humanist in his cultivation of Latin style. And with him the imitatio veterum was never slavish. In a letter to Boccaccio he remarks that the resemblance of a modern’s work to his ancient model should not be that of a portrait to the original, but rather the family likeness of child to parent. He deprecated even the smallest debts of phrase to the ancients, and was annoyed when it was pointed out to him that in one of his Eclogws he had unconsciously borrowed from Virgil the words atque intonat ore. The Latin letters which he poured out so abundantly were in large part finished essays, in a style founded mainly on Seneca and St Augustine, but tinged (especially in his later period) by Cicero. In them he was ever pleading, directly or indirectly, the cause of humanism. An orthodox Churchman, a student of the Vulgate and of the Fathers, he had nothing in common with the neopaganism of some later men. He advocated the study of the classics as the key to a larger mental life, not contrary to the Christian, but ancillary to it; one which should educate and exercise men’s highest faculties. In all subjects he was adverse to pedantic and narrowing methods. If his egotism was absorbing, it was the reflex of a passion for self-culture; here he had a kinship with Goethe. The desire of fame was a ruling motive with him, as with so many Italians of the maturer Renaissance; but in him it was inseparable from the desire to have a new pattern of self-culture recognised.