R. Nisbet Bain - The Cambridge Modern History

It may be questioned whether any other people than the Italian would have been equal to achieving this great task. When Greek and Latin studies had once been resuscitated into a vigorous life, it was easy for nations outside of Italy to carry the work further. But wonderful qualities were demanded in the men who initiated and accomplished the revival in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. There are cases in which it is easier to apprehend the temper and tone of a past age than to picture the chief actors. Thucydides conveys a more vivid idea of Periclean Athens than of the statesman by whose genius it had been moulded. It is not so with the Italian Renaissance. From letters and other sources, one can form tolerably clear images of many among the foremost personalities, such as Petrarch, Boccaccio, Politian, and Aldo; even though it may be difficult to conceive such prodigies of versatility as a Battista Alberti or a Lionardo da Vinci. But it is a much harder thing to imagine the general atmosphere of the revival, the pervading enthusiasm, sustained through several generations, which was so prolific in many-sided work, so far-reaching in its influence on other lands. This atmosphere was created, this enthusiasm kindled, by the labours and examples of men extraordinary both in their powers and in their ardour. Yet it may be doubted whether even they could have wrought so effectually, had they not felt the motive which at the Renaissance was peculiar to Italians,—that patriotism which, failing of political expression, was concentrated on restoring the ancestral language and literature. No other country could show a parallel to the zeal with which Latin was cultivated in Italy, as the chief organ of literary expression, from the days of Petrarch to those of Politian. The ancient tongue, not the modern, was that in which the ablest men of letters chiefly aspired to shine. Few masters of Italian prose emerge in the interval of about a century and a half which separates the age of Villani and Boccaccio from that of Machiavelli and Guicciardini. Such men as Petrarch, Aeneas Sylvius, Jovianus Pontanus, and Paulus Jovius, who might have enriched the prose of their vernacular, preferred to write in Latin. The Platonic Academy of Florence was the first influential coterie which gave its sanction to the view that literary taste and skill, disciplined by the ancient models, could be worthily exercised in Italian. Lorenzo de1 Medici set an example in his lyrics; a more authoritative one was given by Politian, especially in his Orfeo, the first Italian drama of true literary merit. This larger virtue of the Classical Renaissance, as educating a new capacity for culture in general, which came out in Italy only towards the close of the movement, was manifested in other countries almost as soon as they had been fully brought under the influences. of the New Learning. It was conspicuously seen in France, not merely in the work which classicists such as Ronsard and his group did for the French language, but also, for example, in the Aristophanic genius of Rabelais,—the greatest literary representative of the Renaissance for France, in the same large sense that Cervantes was such for Spain, and Shakespeare for England. The historical importance of the Classical Revival in Italy depends ultimately on the fact that it broadened out into this diffusion of a general capacity for liberal culture, taking various forms under different local and national conditions. That capacity, once restored to the civilised world, became a part of the higher life of the race, an energy which, though it might be temporarily retarded here and there by reactionary forces, could not again be lost. Not in literature or in art alone, but in every form of intellectual activity, the Renaissance opened a new era for mankind.

“NUMBERLESS portions of the wisdom of God are wanting to us. Many books of the Sacred Text remain untranslated, as two books of the Maccabees which I know to exist in Greek; and many other books of divers Prophets, whereto reference is made in the books of Kings and Chronicles. Josephus, too, in the books of his Antiquities, is altogether falsely rendered as far as concerns the chronological side: and without him nothing can be known of the history of the Sacred Text. Unless he be corrected, in a new translation, he is of no avail, and the Biblical history is lost. Numberless books, again, of Hebrew and Greek expositors are wanting to the Latins: as those of Origen, Basil, Gregory Nazianzen, Damascene, Dionysius, Chrysostom, and other most noble Doctors, alike in Hebrew and in Greek. The Church, therefore, is slumbering. She does nothing in this matter, nor hath done these seventy years; save that my Lord Robert, Bishop of Lincoln, of holy memory, did give to the Latins some part of the writings of St Dionysius and of Damascene, and some other holy Doctors. It is an amazing thing, this negligence of the Church: for, from the time of Pope Damasus there hath not been any Pope, nor any of less rank, who hath busied himself for the advantaging of the Church by translations, except the aforesaid glorious Bishop.”

It would be difficult to find a better statement, in the same compass, of those gaps in the knowledge of Western Christendom which the Christian Renaissance was to fill. Roger Bacon, the author of the passage, and Robert Grosseteste, who is in part the subject of it, were the two men who, to all appearance, first realised the scientific needs of the Church. If they did not actually initiate the Christian Renaissance they at least stood very close to its beginnings,—as close, one may say, as Petrarch to the beginnings of the Classical Renaissance.

We shall see reason to believe that their influence upon their contemporaries and successors was very great in this respect: and it must also be said that their actual achievements in the way of preparing materials, and in work done, were far from inconsiderable. They merit a more detailed notice than has commonly been accorded to them. It is a matter of common knowledge that Grosseteste brought Greek books to England (probably most of them came from Sicily and South Italy), and that in conjunction with at least two other men whose names are known-Nicholas the Greek, and John of Basingstoke-he gave to the world Latin versions of certain Greek documents. Foremost among these were the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, a famous and early apocryphal book. The manuscript from which the Latin version was made is now in the University Library at Cambridge. Of the same character was a book whose existence in a Latin dress is almost certainly due to Grosseteste-though his name has not until recently been mentioned in connexion with it. This is the pretty Greek romance which treats of the life of Asenath, the patriarch Joseph’s Egyptian wife. Though now forgotten, it was widely known to medieval men, owing to its inclusion in the great Speculum Historiale of Vincent commonly called “of Beauvais.” The claim is sometimes set up in Grosseteste’s behalf that he translated the Lexicon of Suidas into Latin; but when this very curious assertion is examined, we find that all he did was to render into Latin a few of the more important biographical articles in it. The principal one which has survived in his version is the article on Jesus Christ. This is in reality another apocryphon, containing the story of an enquiry into the priestly descent of our Lord. However, the undoubted fact that he possessed a manuscript of the Lexicon is a sufficiently interesting one.

Far more important in its bearings on Christian literature was the Latin version of that text of the Epistles of St Ignatius which is now accepted as presenting them in their most genuine form. This version, too, is reckoned as due to Grosseteste: but it seems to have been the one which attracted least attention of any. Not more than one ancient copy of it is known to exist, and the only medieval writers who show any knowledge of it are Oxford Franciscans, members of the House to which the Bishop bequeathed his library. Not until the seventeenth century were its merits and importance suspected, by Archbishop Ussher.