Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 | Page 6

transformation. The Papacy became more autocratic. Like the king, the
Pope began to say, 'L'Eglise c'est moi.' This merging of the mediæval
State and mediæval Church in the personal supremacy of King and
Pope may be termed the special feature of the last age of feudalism
which preceded the Renaissance. It was thus that the necessary
conditions and external circumstances were prepared. The organization
of the five great nations, and the leveling of political and spiritual
interests under political and spiritual despots, formed the prelude to that
drama of liberty of which the Renaissance was the first act, the
Reformation the second, the Revolution the third, and which we nations
of the present are still evolving in the establishment of the democratic
idea.
Meanwhile, it must not be imagined that the Renaissance burst

suddenly upon the world in the fifteenth century without premonitory
symptoms. Far from that: within the middle age itself, over and over
again, the reason strove to break loose from its fetters. Abelard, in the
twelfth century, tried to prove that the interminable dispute about
entities and words was founded on a misapprehension. Roger Bacon, at
the beginning of the thirteenth century, anticipated modern science, and
proclaimed that man, by use of nature, can do all things. Joachim of
Flora, intermediate between the two, drank one drop of the cup of
prophecy offered to his lips, and cried that 'the Gospel of the Father
was past, the Gospel of the Son was passing, the Gospel of the Spirit
was to be.' These three men, each in his own way, the Frenchman as a
logician, the Englishman as an analyst, the Italian as a mystic, divined
the future but inevitable emancipation of the reason of mankind. Nor
were there wanting signs, especially in Provence, that Aphrodite and
Phoebus and the Graces were ready to resume their sway. The
premature civilization of that favored region, so cruelly extinguished by
the Church, was itself a reaction of nature against the restrictions
imposed by ecclesiastical discipline; while the songs of the wandering
students, known under the title of _Carmina Burana_, indicate a revival
of Pagan or pre-Christian feeling in the very stronghold of mediæval
learning. We have, moreover, to remember the Cathari, the Paterini, the
Fraticelli, the Albigenses, the Hussites--heretics in whom the new light
dimly shone, but who were instantly exterminated by the Church. We
have to commemorate the vast conception of the Emperor Frederick II.,
who strove to found a new society of humane culture in the South of
Europe, and to anticipate the advent of the spirit of modern tolerance.
He, too, and all his race were exterminated by the Papal jealousy. Truly
we may say with Michelet that the Sibyl of the Renaissance kept
offering her books in vain to feudal Europe. In vain because the time
was not yet. The ideas projected thus early on the modern world were
immature and abortive, like those headless trunks and zoophitic
members of half-molded humanity which, in the vision of Empedocles,
preceded the birth of full-formed man. The nations were not ready.
Franciscans imprisoning Roger Bacon for venturing to examine what
God had meant to keep secret; Dominicans preaching crusades against
the cultivated nobles of Toulouse; Popes stamping out the seed of
enlightened Frederick; Benedictines erasing the masterpieces of

classical literature to make way for their own litanies and lurries, or
selling pieces of the parchment for charms; a laity devoted by
superstition to saints and by sorcery to the devil; a clergy sunk in
sensual sloth or fevered with demoniac zeal: these still ruled the
intellectual destinies of Europe. Therefore the first anticipations of the
Renaissance were fragmentary and sterile.
Then came a second period. Dante's poem, a work of conscious art,
conceived in a modern spirit and written in a modern tongue, was the
first true sign that Italy, the leader of the nations of the West, had
shaken off her sleep. Petrarch followed. His ideal, of antique culture as
the everlasting solace and the universal education of the human race,
his lifelong effort to recover the classical harmony of thought and
speech, gave a direct impulse to one of the chief movements of the
Renaissance--its passionate outgoing toward the ancient world. After
Petrarch, Boccaccio opened yet another channel for the stream of
freedom. His conception of human existence as joy to be accepted with
thanksgiving, not as a gloomy error to be rectified by suffering,
familiarized the fourteenth century with that form of semi-pagan
gladness which marked the real Renaissance.
In Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio Italy recovered the consciousness of
intellectual liberty. What we call the Renaissance had not yet arrived;
but their achievement rendered its appearance in due season certain.
With Dante the genius of the modern world dared to stand alone and to
create confidently after