A FRENCH writer, E. J. Delécluze (A.D. I 1781–1863), seems to have been the first to use the term la renaissance 1 (rebirth) to describe the impact made by a dead Hellenic civilization on Western Christendom at a particular time and place, namely Northern and Central Italy in the Late Medieval period. This particular impact of the dead on the living is very far from being the only example of its kind that history affords, and we shall here adopt the term as a general name for such phenomena and proceed to an examination of them. In so doing, we shall have to be careful not to include more than we intend. In so far as this Hellenic culture in the provinces of art and literature—for the term in its conventional use is limited to these—came to Italy through contact with Byzantine scholars, it was not, of course, an encounter in time with a dead civilization but an encounter in space with a living one, and belongs to the subject discussed in the previous Part of this Study. Again, when ‘Greece crossed the Alps’ and the Italian Renaissance affected the art and literature of France and other Transalpine Western countries, this, in so far as it came through contemporary Italy and not direct from ‘ancient’ Greece was, again, not strictly a renaissance, but was a transmission of the acquisitions of a pioneer section of a society to other sections of the same society, and, as such, belongs to the subject of ‘Growth’ and has been discussed, in this context, in the Third Part of this Study. But these logical distinctions may seem somewhat fine drawn, and in practice it may prove both difficult and unnecessary to distinguish between a ‘pure’ renaissance, in the sense of a direct encounter with a dead society, and a renaissance alloyed in one or other of the manners just indicated.
We must also observe, before plunging into our exploration of renaissances, that these phenomena have to be distinguished from two other types of encounter between the present and the past. One is the relationship of Apparentation-and-Affiliation between a dying or dead civilization and its embryo or infant successor. This is a subject about which we have already written at length and it may be regarded as a normal and necessary phenomenon, as is implied in our application to it of the analogy of parenthood and sonship. A renaissance, on the other hand, is an encounter between a grown-up civilization and the ‘ghost’ of its long-dead parent. Though common enough, it may be described as abnormal, and will be found on examination to be often unwholesome. The other type of encounter between present and past from which renaissances are to be distinguished is the phenomenon which we have called Archaism, using this word to denote attempted reversions to an earlier phase in the development of the society to which the archaizers themselves belong.
One more point of distinction between these three types of encounter between present and past has still to be established. In the relation of Apparentation-and-Affiliation it is obvious that the two societies in contact are at very different, indeed opposite, stages of development. The parent is a disintegrating society in its dotage; the offspring is a new-born ‘muling and puking’ infant. Again, an archaizing body has obviously fallen in love with a state of affairs very different from its own; otherwise, why archaize? A society entering on a renaissance, on the other hand, is perhaps more likely than not to call up the ghost of its parent as that parent was when he had reached the same stage of development as the offspring has now reached. It is as if Hamlet could choose the kind of paternal ghost that he was to encounter on the battlements: either a father whose beard was ‘a sable silvered’ or, alternatively, a father who was of his son’s own age.
The Late Medieval Italian renaissance of Hellenism exerted a more enduring influence on Western life on the political plane than on either the literary or the artistic. Moreover, these political manifestations not only outlived the aesthetic but also forestalled them. They began when the Lombard cities passed out of the control of their bishops into the hands of communes administered by boards of magistrates responsible to the citizens. This resuscitation of the Hellenic institution of the city state in eleventh-century Italy proceeded, as a result of the radiation of Italian culture into Transalpine provinces of Western Christendom, to make a corresponding impact on the peoples of the Western feudal monarchies. Both in its earlier and narrower and in its later and wider field the influence of this Hellenic revenant was the same. The superficial effect was to propagate a cult of constitutional government, which was eventually to confer upon itself the Hellenic title of Democracy, but the difficulties and failures of constitutionalism opened the way for the equally Hellenic figure of the Tyrant, first in the Italian city states and afterwards on a more extended and, consequently, a more disastrous scale.
Another Hellenic ghost presented itself on the medieval stage when Charlemagne was crowned as a Roman Emperor by Pope Leo III in St. Peter’s on Christmas Day A.D. 800. That institution, too, had a long history ahead of it. The most devoutly pedantic Hellenizer among these ghost emperors was the Saxon Otto III (reigned A.D. 983–1002), who transferred the seat of his government to Rome—a site which at that date lay in a patch of common ground on which the domains of the two Christendoms overlapped. In installing himself in the former Imperial City, Otto III had hoped to fortify the sickly counterfeit of the Roman Imperial Power that had been palmed off on Western Christendom by reinforcing it with tougher metal from a Byzantine mint. As we have seen in another context, Otto Ill’s experiment, which collapsed after his early death, was repeated more than two centuries later, in much more favourable circumstances, and with much more alarming results, by a man of genius, Frederick II Hohenstaufen.
Many centuries later, Rousseau popularized the Plutarchan version of Hellenism. Consequently the French revolutionists never tired of allusions to Solon and Lycurgus and dressed both their ladies and their Directors in what were supposed to be ‘classical’ costumes. What could be more natural than that the first Napoleon, when he wanted to raise himself above the rank of ‘consul’, should style himself ‘emperor’ and should confer on his son and heir the title ‘King of Rome’, which had been borne by candidates for the medieval Western office of ‘Holy Roman Emperor’ until they were crowned at Rome by the Pope (a consecration which many of them failed to achieve)? As for the second (soi-disant third) Napoleon, he actually wrote, or caused to be published under his name, a life of Julius Caesar. Finally Hitler paid his tribute to the ghost of a ghost by establishing his country residence on a crag overhanging an enchanted Barbarossa’s holy cave at Berchtesgaden and by accepting the regalia of Charlemagne, stolen from a Hapsburg museum.
But another and more benevolent ghost hovers round the institution of Western Christian monarchy. The religious sanction given to the formal revival of the Roman Empire in the West on Christmas Day, A.D. 800, when a Frankish king was created Roman Emperor in virtue of being crowned by the Pope, had no precedent in Hellenic history. The ceremony performed on that day in Rome had, however, a pertinent precedent in a ceremony performed at Soissons in A.D. 751, when the Austrasian major-domo Pepin had been created King of the Franks in virtue of being crowned and anointed by Pope Zacharias’s representative, Saint Boniface. This Western rite of ecclesiastical consecration—already customary in Visigothic Spain—was a revival of an Israelite institution recorded in the Books of Samuel and Kings. The consecrations of King David by the prophet Samuel and of King Solomon by Zadok the priest and Nathan the prophet are the precedents for all the coronations of kings and queens in Western Christendom.
We have already seen that a Roman Law which, in the course of ten centuries ending with its codification by Justinian, had been slowly and laboriously elaborated to meet the needs, first of the Roman people and afterwards of the whole Hellenic society, had been rapidly left stranded by the collapse of the way of life which it had been designed to regulate—and this not only in the Western but also in the Eastern half of the Hellenic world. Thereafter the symptoms of decay were followed by the symptoms of new life on the legal, as on the political, plane. The impulse to provide a live law for a living society did not find its first vent in any move to reanimate a Roman Law that, in the eighth century of the Christian Era, was perched, high up above contemporary heads, like a Noah’s Ark on the roof of the mighty mausoleum of an extinct Hellenic culture. Each of the two new Christian societies, Eastern and Western, demonstrated the sincerity of its belief in a Christian dispensation by attempting, first, to create a Christian law for a would-be Christian people. In both Christendoms, however, this new departure was followed by a renaissance, first of the Mosaic law contained in the Scriptures which Christendom had inherited from Jewry, and secondly of the Roman law as petrified in the Code of Justinian.
In Orthodox Christendom the Christian new departure was announced, in the joint reign of the two Syrian founders of the East Roman Empire, Leo III and his son Constantine V, in the promulgation, in A.D. 740, of ‘a Christian law book’, which was ‘a deliberate attempt to change the legal system of the Empire by the application of Christian principles’. 1 It was, however, almost inevitable that the birth of a new Christian law should be followed by a renaissance of the Jewish law which the Christian Church, perhaps unwisely and certainly not wholly happily, had insisted on including in the Canon of its own Scriptures. Whether Mosaic or Christian, however, the legal system established by the Syrian emperors proved less and less adequate for coping with the growing complexities of Byzantine society, and in the years following A.D. 870 the founder of the Macedonian Dynasty, Basil I, and his sons and successors gave notice that they ‘had totally rejected and discarded the imbecilities promulgated by the Isaurians’, that is by the foregoing Syrian emperors. With this hearty depreciation of their predecessors the Macedonian emperors nerved themselves to the task of restoring to life the Code of Justinian. In doing so they imagined that they were being truly Roman, much as, in the province of architecture, the Gothic revivalists of the nineteenth century imagined that they were being truly Gothic. But the trouble about all revivals or renaissances is that they are not, and in the nature of things cannot be, ‘the genuine article’. They differ from the genuine article very much as the waxworks at Madame Tussaud’s differ from the people who pass through the turnstiles to look at them.
The plot of the legal drama in which a Christian new departure was dogged by the successively raised ghosts of Moses and Justinian can be seen likewise working itself out on a Western stage, on which the role of Leo Syrus was played by Charlemagne.
‘The Carolingian legislation … marks the emergence of the new social consciousness of Western Christendom. Hitherto the legislation of the Western kingdoms had been of the nature of a Christian appendix to the old barbarian tribal codes. Now, for the first time, a complete break was made with the Past, and Christendom enacted its own laws, which covered the whole field of social activity in Church and State and referred all things to the single standard of the Christian ethos. This was inspired neither by Germanic nor [by] Roman precedent.’ 2
In Western, as in Orthodox, Christendom, however, the ghost of Moses trod hard on the Apostles’ and the Evangelists’ heels.
‘The Carolingian Emperors gave the law to the whole Christian people in the spirit of the kings and judges of the Old Testament, declaring the Law of God to the people of God. In the letter which Cathaulf addressed to Charles at the beginning of his reign, the writer speaks of the king as the earthly representative of God, and he counsels Charles to use the Book of Divine Law as his manual of government, according to the precept of Deuteronomy xvii. 18–20, which commands the King to make a copy of the Law from the books of the priests, to keep it always with him, and to read it constantly, so that he may learn to fear the Lord and keep His laws, lest his heart be lifted up in pride above his brethren and he turn aside to the right hand or to the left.’ 1
Yet, in Western, as in Orthodox, Christendom, a resurgent Moses was overtaken by a resurgent Justinian.
In the course of the eleventh century of the Christian Era the Imperial Law School established by official action at Constantinople in A.D. 1045 found its counterpart in Western Christendom at Bologna in the spontaneous emergence there of an autonomous university dedicated to the study of the Corpus Iuris of Justinian; and, though in Western Christendom a resuscitated Roman Law failed eventually to serve the purpose of underpinning a resuscitated Roman Empire, it did potently serve the alternative purpose of fostering the revival, on Western ground, of an earlier Hellenic political institution, the sovereign independent parochial state. The civil lawyers educated by Bologna and her daughter universities became the administrators, not of an abortive Western ‘Holy Roman Empire’, but of effective Western parochial sovereign states, and the efficiency of their professional services was one of the causes of the progressive victory of this institution over all the alternative forms of political organization that were latent in Western Christendom’s original social structure.
While the Bolognese civilians were providing the cities of North and Central Italy with administrators whose competence enabled the communes to overthrow their prince-bishops and to launch out on a career of civic self-government, the canonists were supplementing the Bolognese school of civil law with a sister faculty of ecclesiastical law after the publication of Gratian’s encyclopaedic Decretum (A.D. 1140–50). The canonists also made their contribution to the development of the parochial secular state, though they were aiming in the opposite direction. Their actual achievement is, indeed, one of the sombre ironies of history.
It might be said that the Holy See employed the canonists as the instruments of their wordy warfare with the Papacy’s secular rival, the Holy Roman Empire; but a more accurate picture is presented by the statement that the canonists took possession of the Holy See. All the great Popes from Alexander III (A.D. 1159–81), who held the ecclesiastical fort against Frederick Barbarossa, through Innocent III (A.D. 1198–1216), who gave his world a foretaste of what Papal absolutism in the political sphere might mean, and Innocent IV (A.D. 1243–54), who encountered the great Stupor Mundi with a stubborn unscrupulousness quite equal to his own, down to Boniface VIII (A.D. 1294–1303), who collided disastrously with the strong monarchies of France and England—all these, and also most of the lesser Popes who filled the gaps between them, were not theologians (students of God) but canonists (students of Law). The first result was the downfall of the Empire; the second was the ruin of the Papacy, which never thereafter, until galvanized into new life after (and not before) the catastrophe of the Protestant secession, recovered from the moral and religious discredit in which its legalism had involved it. The downfall of both Empire and Papacy cleared the way in the West for the advance of the parochial state.
This field presents a pair of nearly contemporary renaissances at opposite ends of the Eurasian continent, namely the revival of the Confucian philosophy of the Sinic world in that East Asian civilization’s offspring, the Far Eastern society, and the revival of the Aristotelian philosophy of the Hellenic world in Western Christendom.
Our first example might be ruled out of court on the ground that the Confucian philosophy did not in fact die with the society which had produced it but merely weathered a period of hibernation, and that what has not died is constitutionally disqualified from reappearing as a ‘ghost’. We must admit the force of this objection but beg that it may be overlooked; for the re-establishment by the T’ang Emperor, T’ai T’sung, in A.D. 622, of an official examination in the Confucian Classics as a method of selecting recruits for the imperial civil service does present the essential characteristics of a renaissance, and it also marks the fact that, in the political field, the Taoists and Buddhists had let slip an opportunity for supplanting the Confucians which had seemed to be within their grasp during the post-Sinic interregnum, when the prestige of the Confucians had been damaged by the collapse of the universal state with which they had come to be identified.
The contrast between this political failure of the Buddhist Mahāyāna and the success with which the Christian Church seized and harvested its political opportunities in Western Europe brings out the fact that, in comparison with Christianity, the Mahāyāna was a politically incompetent religion. The patronage of the parochial princes of Northern China, which it enjoyed during the best part of three centuries following the collapse of the United Tsin Empire, was of no more avail to the Mahāyāna than the more potent patronage of the Kushan Emperor Kanishka had been at an earlier period. As soon, however, as the encounter on Far Eastern ground between the Mahāyāna and Confucianism was transferred from the political to the spiritual plane, the fortunes of their almost bloodless war were dramatically reversed. A modern Chinese authority on the subject tells us that ‘the Neo-Confucianists more consistently adhere to the fundamental ideas of Taoism and Buddhism than do the Taoists and Buddhists themselves’. 1
When we pass from the renaissance of a Sinic Confucian philosophy in Far Eastern history to the renaissance of an Hellenic Aristotelian philosophy in Western Christian history, we find the plot of the play taking a different turn. Whereas Neo-Confucianism succumbed spiritually to a Mahāyāna, Neo-Aristotelianism imposed itself on the theology of the Christian Church, in whose official view Aristotle could not be other than a heathen. In each case the party in power was worsted by an opponent who had nothing to recommend him but his intrinsic merits. In the Far Eastern case a philosophic civil service succumbs to the spirit of an alien religion; in the Western case an established church succumbs to the spirit of an alien philosophy.
The ghost of Aristotle in Western Christendom displayed the same astonishing intellectual potency as a living Mahāyāna in a Far Eastern world.
‘It was not [from the Roman tradition] that [Western] Europe derived the critical intelligence and the restless spirit of scientific inquiry which have made [the] Western Civilisation the heir and successor of the Greeks. It is usual to date the coming of this new element from the [Italian] Renaissance and the revival of Greek studies in the fifteenth century, but the real turning-point must be placed three centuries earlier…. Already at Paris in the days of Abelard (vivebat A.D. 1079–1142) and John of Salisbury (vivebat circa A.D. 1115–1180) the passion for dialectic and the spirit of philosophical speculation had begun to transform the intellectual atmosphere of [Western] Christendom; and from that time forward the higher studies were dominated by the technique of logical discussion—the quaestio and the public disputation which so largely determined the form of Mediaeval [Western] Philosophy, even in its greatest representatives. ”Nothing”, says Robert of Sorbonne, ”is known perfectly which has not been masticated by the teeth of disputation;” and the tendency to submit every question, from the most obvious to the most abstruse, to this process of mastication not only encouraged readiness of wit and exactness of thought but, above all, developed that spirit of criticism and methodic doubt to which Western culture and Modern Science have owed so much.’ 1
A ghost of Aristotle that set this abiding impress on the spirit, as well as on the form, of Western thought also produced a passing effect on its substance; and, though the impress here was less durable, it nevertheless went deep enough to require a long and arduous campaign of mental strife as the price of its eventual effacement.
‘In [the] whole picture of the Universe [as seen by Medieval Western eyes] there is more of Aristotle than of Christianity. It was the authority of Aristotle and his successors which was responsible even for those features of this teaching which might seem to us to carry something of an ecclesiastical flavour—the hierarchy of heavens, the revolving spheres, the intelligences which moved the planets, the grading of the elements in the order of their nobility, and the view that the celestial bodies were composed of an incorruptible fifth essence. Indeed, we may say [that] it was Aristotle rather than Ptolemy who had to be overthrown in the sixteenth century, and it was Aristotle who provided the great obstruction to the Copernican theory.’ 2
By the seventeenth century of the Christian Era, when the native intellectual genius of the West reasserted itself on ‘Baconian’ lines by setting out to explore the world of Nature, the theology of the Church had become so entangled in Aristotelianism that Giordano Bruno forfeited his life and Galileo incurred ecclesiastical censure for scientific heresies which had no relation whatever to the Christian religion as it appears in the New Testament.
Before the seventeenth century, Transalpine Western scientists and philosophers had attacked the Schoolmen for their subservience to Aristotle—’their dictator’ as Bacon called him—while the fifteenth-century Italian humanists had attacked them for their bad Latin. But Aristotelian theology was proof against the sneers of the connoisseurs of a classical style. It is true that these critics extracted from the name of the eminent Aristotelian scholar Duns Scotus the pejorative word ‘dunce’, signifying not an ignorant person but a devotee to an obsolete system of learning; but, by the time of writing, the humanists’ turn had come. In the twentieth century of the Christian Era, when natural science and technology appeared to be carrying all before them, it might have seemed that the ‘dunces’ were to be sought in the dwindling remnant of the once preponderant ‘Classical Side’.
A living language is primarily a form of speech, as is suggested by the fact that the word itself stems from the Latin word for tongue; its literature is, as it were, its by-product. When, however, the ghosts of a language and literature are raised from the dead, the relation between the two is inverted. The learning of the language is merely a painful prerequisite for reading the literature. When we learn ‘vocative, mensa, O table’ we are not acquiring a new vocabulary for the expression of our feelings when we stub our toes against a table-leg in the dark, but are taking a first short step towards the distant objective of reading Virgil, Horace, and the rest of the Latin classics. We do not attempt to speak the language, and, when we try to write it, it is only in order that we may the better appreciate the work of the ‘ancient’ masters.
The first step towards reoccupying a long since derelict literary empire is a work that may require the mobilization of a living political empire’s resources. The typical monument of a literary renaissance in its first phase is an anthology, corpus, thesaurus, lexicon, or encyclopaedia compiled by a team of scholars at the instance of a prince; and the princely patron of such works of cooperative scholarship has been, more often than not, the ruler of a resuscitated universal state that has, itself, been the product of a renaissance on the political plane. Of the five outstanding representatives of this type—Asshurbanipal, Constantine Porphyro-genitus, Yung Lo, K’ang Hsi, and Ch’ien Lung—the last four had all been such. In this task of collecting, editing, annotating, and publishing the surviving works of a ‘dead’ classical literature, the Far Eastern Emperors of a resuscitated Sinic universal state had far outdistanced all their competitors.
It is true that the size of Asshurbanipal’s two clay libraries of Sumerian and Akkadian classical literature was an unknown quantity for modern archaeologists who had learnt of the assemblage and dispersal of these two great Assyrian collections by recovering some of the tablets in the course of their excavations on the site of Nineveh; for, within perhaps not more than sixteen years of the royal scholar’s death, the contents of both his libraries had been scattered broadcast over the ruins of the hateful city that had been stormed and sacked in 612 B.C. Asshurbanipal’s collection may have been larger than the Confucian Canon of the Sinic classics, which was not facilely impressed on soft clay but was laboriously engraved on hard stone, at Si Ngan, the imperial capital of the T’ang Dynasty, between A.D. 836 and 841, and was printed a century later, with a commentary, in an edition running to 130 volumes. Yet we may guess with some confidence that the number of cuneiform characters in Asshurbanipal’s collection fell far short of the number of Sinic characters contained in the collection which Yung Lo, the second Emperor of the Ming Dynasty, assembled in A.D. 1403–7, for this ran to no fewer than 22,877 books filling 11,095 volumes, exclusive of the table of contents. Compared with this, the Hellenic collection of the East Roman Emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus (reigned A.D. 912–59) sinks into insignificance, though even this is staggering to a Western mind.
When we pass from these preliminary tasks to the scholar’s conceit of producing imitations of the classical literatures to which he has devoted his labours, we must leave it to statisticians to determine whether the number of essays in the Sinic classical style produced by candidates for the Chinese imperial civil service examinations in the course of the 1,283 years that elapsed between their reinstitution in A.D. 622 and their abolition in A.D. 1905 was greater or less than the number of exercises in the writing of Latin and Greek prose and verse produced by scholars and schoolboys of the Western world between the fifteenth century and the time of writing. But in the use of resuscitated classical languages for serious literary purposes neither the West nor the Far East could stand comparison with the line of Byzantine historians, including such masters of the art as a tenth-century Leo Diaconus and a twelfth-century Anna Comnena, who found their medium of literary expression in a renaissance of the Attic Greek koinê .
It will probably have occurred to the reader that our remarks about literary renaissances so far seem to be singularly inapplicable to the literary renaissance—The Renaissance, in fact—which occupies the forefront in his own mind. Surely the Italian renaissance of Hellenic literature in the Late Medieval period, though it may have had its patrons among political grandees such as Lorenzo dei Medici, was essentially a spontaneous movement of unorganized scholarship. Perhaps it was—though the patronage of the fifteenth-century Popes, more particularly Pope Nicholas V (A.D. 1447–55), is not to be underrated. This Pope employed hundreds of classical scholars and copyists of ancient manuscripts, gave 10,000 gulden for a translation of Homer into Latin verse, and assembled a library of 9,000 volumes. However, if we allow our minds to travel back over the previous course of Western history, through several centuries running back from the age of ‘the Renaissance’, we shall find something much more in line with the examples that we have been considering. We shall find Charlemagne, the resuscitator of the universal state of a dead civilization, tentatively aligning himself with Asshurbanipal, Yung Lo, and Constantine Porphyrogenitus.
The abortive first attempt at a literary renaissance of Hellenism in Western Christendom was coeval with the birth of the Western Christian civilization. The English Church had owed its organization at the end of the seventh century to a Greek refugee from an Eastern Orthodox Christian territory conquered by Islam, Archbishop Theodore of Tarsus, and the prophet of the Hellenic renaissance in the West was a Northumbrian, the Venerable Bede (A.D. 673–735). Another Northumbrian, Alcuin of York (A.D. 735–804), carried the seed to the court of Charlemagne, and, before the movement was prematurely extinguished by a blast of barbarism from Scandinavia, its cultivators had not only begun to revive the Hellenic literary culture in its Latin dress but had even acquired a smattering of Greek. Alcuin had dared to dream that, supported by the patronage of Charlemagne, he would be able to conjure up the ghost of Athens on the soil of Frankland. It was a fleeting vision; and, when Western Christendom began to re-emerge from what has been called ‘the darkness of the ninth century’, the ghost admitted was not that of the Hellenic Classical literature; it was the ghost of ‘Aristotil and his philosophic’. 1 The centuries of the Schoolmen had to come and go before the vision of Alcuin was realized.
If we pause at this point to consider why the hopes of Alcuin and his friends were deferred for so many centuries, we discover a difference between the encounters in space, to which the previous part of this Study was devoted, and the encounters in time which we are now considering. An encounter in space is a collision in space, and collisions are usually accidents. Military prowess or new skills in navigating the oceans or the desiccation of the Steppe may be the culturally irrelevant causes which lead to one society’s falling upon another, with the cultural consequences that we have described. An encounter in time (a renaissance), on the other hand, is an act of necromancy, the calling up of a ghost; and the necromancer will fail to call up the ghost until he has learnt the tricks of his trade. In other words, a Western Christendom could not entertain an Hellenic ghost, or guest, until its own house was fit to receive the visitor. The Hellenic library was physically present all the time, but it could not be effectively opened until the Westerner was competent to read its contents.
For example, there was never a time, even at the blackest nadir of a Western Dark Age, when the Western Christian society did not physically possess the works of Virgil and did not retain sufficient knowledge of Latin to construe his sentences. Yet there were at least eight centuries, from the seventh to the fourteenth inclusive, during which Virgil’s poetry was beyond the comprehension of the most gifted Western Christian students, if we take as our standard of understanding an ability to grasp the meaning which Virgil had intended to convey and which had been duly comprehended by his like-minded contemporaries and by posterity down to, let us say, the generation of Saint Augustine. Even Dante, on whose spirit the first glimmer of an Italian renaissance of Hellenism was beginning to dawn, saw in Virgil a figure which the historical Virgil would have taken, not for his own human self, but for some augustly mythical personage such as Orpheus.
Similarly, there was never a time at which the Western society did not possess the philosophical works of Aristotle, competently translated into Latin by the Late Hellenic man of letters, Boethius (A.D. 480–524); yet there were six centuries, reckoning from the date of Boëthius’s death, during which his translations were beyond the comprehension of the most acute Western Christian thinkers. When, at last, the Western Christians were ready for Aristotle, they got him, by a roundabout route, through Arabic translations. In offering to a sixth-century Western Christendom his Latin translations of Aristotle, Boethius was like a benevolent but ill-judging uncle who presents, let us say, the poems of Mr. T. S. Eliot to his nephew on his thirteenth birthday. The nephew, after a brief inspection, places the book in the darkest corner of his small library and, quite sensibly, forgets all about it. Six years later—the equivalent of centuries on the reduced time-span of an individual adolescence—the nephew encounters these poems again as an Oxford undergraduate, falls under their spell, purchases them from Messrs. B. H. Blackwell, and is unfeignedly surprised to discover, on returning home for the vacation, that the book had been standing on his shelves all the time.
As it was with Virgil and with Aristotle, so it was also with the masterpieces of Greek literature, stored in the Byzantine libraries, which were to be the staple food of the Italian Hellenic renaissance on its literary side. Western Christendom had been in close contact with the Byzantine world, at least from the eleventh century onwards. During the first half of the thirteenth century Frankish conquerors were in actual occupation of Constantinople and Greece. Culturally nothing came of this at that time; for in the West the ‘Classics’ were as yet ‘caviare to the general’. It might be said, in explanation, that these contacts were hostile contacts that would not dispose the Westerner favourably towards a Byzantine library of Hellenic literature; but to this it must be answered that political and ecclesiastical contacts were no less hostile in the fifteenth century, when ‘the Renaissance’ was in full bloom. The reason for the difference in the cultural consequences is plain; a renaissance of a dead culture will occur only when an affiliated society has raised itself to the cultural level at which its predecessor was standing at the time when it was accomplishing the achievements that have now become candidates for resuscitation.
When we look into the deaths of the literary renaissances in Western Christendom and China, we find that they held sway unchallenged until overthrown by a masterful alien intruder in the shape of a Modern Western civilization which captivated the soul of Western Christendom in the course of the seventeenth century and the soul of China at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries of the Christian Era. The Western society had been left to wrestle with its Hellenic ghost without external interference; but the war of pamphlets at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which Swift called ‘The Battle of the Books’, and in which the disputants were arguing the question of the relative merits of ‘the Ancients’ and ‘the Moderns’, had shown which way the wind was blowing. The question at issue seemed to be whether the Western culture was to remain rooted to the spot, paralysed by a retrospective admiration for, and imitation of, ‘the Ancients’, or was to go forward into the unknown, leaving ‘the Ancients’ behind. Thus put, the question could admit of only one sensible answer, but the question itself begged a previous question, and that was whether a retrospective admiration and imitation of ‘the Ancients’ —what we may call the ‘Modern Western classical education’ in the widest sense of that term—had in fact cramped ‘modern’ development.
The answer to this question was manifestly favourable to ‘the Ancients’, and it was significant that some of the pioneers of Hellenic studies, Petrarch and Boccaccio for example, had also been leading lights in the development of vernacular Italian literature. So far from checking the progress of the vernacular literatures, the renaissance of Hellenic studies had given it fresh impetus. The mastery of Ciceronian Latin achieved by Erasmus had not lured his fellow Westerners into abandoning the literary cultivation of their own mother tongues. It is quite impossible to assess the cultural nexus of cause and effect between, for example, English sixteenth-century Hellenic studies and the outburst of an English poetry of unexampled brilliance at the end of the same century. Did Shakespeare’s ‘little Latin and less Greek’ assist the composition of his plays? Who shall say? It may be thought that Milton had too much Latin and Greek, but, if he had had none of either, we should have had no Paradise Lost and no Samson Agonistes .
The renaissance of one or other of the visual arts of a dead civilization in the history of its successor is a common phenomenon. We may cite as examples the renaissance of ‘the old Kingdom’s’ style of sculpture and painting, after a lapse of two thousand years, in a latter-day Egyptiac world of the Saïte Age in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C. ; the renaissance of a Sumeric style of carving in bas-relief in a Babylonic world of the ninth, eighth, and seventh centuries B.C. ; and the renaissance, in miniature, of an Hellenic style of carving in bas-relief, of which the finest examples were Attic masterpieces of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. , on the ivory of Byzantine diptychs in the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries of the Christian Era. These three visual renaissances, however, were all left far behind, both in the range of ground covered and in the ruthlessness of the eviction of previous occupants, by the renaissance of Hellenic visual arts in Western Christendom which made its first epiphany in a Late Medieval Italy and spread thence to the rest of the Western world. This evocation of the ghost of Hellenic visual arts was practised in the three fields of architecture, sculpture, and painting, and in each field the revenant style made so clean a sweep that, when its force was spent, there ensued a kind of aesthetic vacuum in which Western artists were at a loss to know how to express their long-submerged native genius.
The same strange tale of a house swept and garnished by the drastic hands of ghostly visitants has to be told in telling of each of these three provinces of Western visual art, but the most extraordinary episode of the three was the triumph of an Hellenic revenant over the native genius of the West in the province of sculpture in the round; for in this field the thirteenth-century Northern French exponents of an original Western style had produced masterpieces equal in merit with the best work of the Hellenic, Egyptiac, and Mahayanian Buddhist schools, whereas, in the field of painting, Western artists had not yet shaken off the tutelage of the more precocious art of a sister Orthodox Christian society, and in the field of architecture the Romanesque style—which, as its latter-day label indicates, was a variation on a theme inherited from the latest age of an antecedent Hellenic civilization —had already been overwhelmed by an intrusive ‘Gothic’ which had originated, as we have already mentioned, in the Syriac world of the ‘Abbasid and Andalusian Caliphates.
For a twentieth-century Londoner’s enlightenment, the combatants in a mortal struggle between a twice-defeated native Western visual art and its Syriac and Hellenic assailants were still standing, turned to stone, in the architecture and sculpture of the chapel added to Westminster Abbey under the auspices of King Henry VII. The vaulting of the roof is a late triumph of an expiring Gothic style. In the host of erect stone figures in excelsis which gaze down at an Italianate Hellenized trinity of recumbent bronze figures on the tombs below, a Transalpine school of native Western Christian sculpture sings a silent swan-song between frozen lips. The centre of the stage is held by the Hellenizing masterpieces of Torrigiani (A.D. 1472–1522), who, contemptuously ignoring the uncouth milieu in which he had deigned to execute his competently polished work, was looking around him complacently, in the confident expectation that these fruits of a Florentine master’s exile would be the cynosure of every Transalpine sightseer’s eyes. For we learn from Benvenuto Cellini’s autobiography that this same Torrigiani was a man of ‘most arrogant spirit’, and that he was given to boasting of his ‘gallant feats among those beasts of Englishmen’. 1
A ‘Gothic’ architecture which thus continued to hold its own until the first quarter of the sixteenth century in London—and the first half of the seventeenth century in Oxford—had by then long since been driven off the field in Northern and Central Italy, where it had never succeeded so decisively as in Transalpine Europe in displacing the Romanesque style.
The sterility with which the Western genius had been afflicted by a renaissance of Hellenism in the domain of architecture was proclaimed in its failure to reap any harvest from the birth-pangs of the Industrial Revolution. A mutation of industrial technique that had begotten the iron girder had thrust into the Western architect’s hands an incomparably versatile new building material at a time when the Hellenizing architectural tradition was evidenty exh austed. Yet the architects who had been presented by the blacksmith with an iron girder, and by Providence with a clean slate, could think of no better way of filling an opportune vacuum than to cap an Hellenic renaissance with a ‘Gothic’ revival.
The first Westerner to think of frankly turning the iron girder to account without bashfully drawing a ‘Gothic’ veil over its vulgarity was not a professing architect but an imaginative amateur; and, though he was a citizen of the United States, the site on which he erected his historic structure overlooked the shores of the Bosphorus, not the banks of the Hudson. The nucleus of Robert College—Hamlin Hall, dominating Mehmed the Conqueror’s Castle of Europe—was built by Cyrus Hamlin in A.D. 1869–71; yet it was not until the following century that the seed sown by Hamlin began to bear fruit in North America and in Western Europe.
The sterilizing of the West’s artistic genius was no less conspicuous in the realms of painting and sculpture. Over the span of more than half a millennium running from the generation of Dante’s contemporary Giotto (died A.D. 1337), a Modern Western school of painting, which had unquestioningly accepted the naturalistic ideals of Hellenic visual art in its post-archaic phase, had worked out, one after another, diverse methods of conveying the visual impressions made by light and shade, until this long-sustained effort to produce the effects of photography through prodigies of artistic technique had been stultified by the invention of photography itself. After the ground had thus inconsiderately been cut away from under their feet by an operation of Modern Western science, the painters made a ‘Pre-Raphaelite Movement’ in the direction of their long-since repudiated Byzantine masters, before they thought of exploring a new world of psychology which Science had given them to conquer in compensation for the old world of natural appearance which she had stolen from them and presented to the photographer. So arose an apocalyptic school of Western painters who made a genuinely new departure by frankly using paint to convey spiritual experiences instead of visual impressions; and Western sculptors were, within the limits of their own medium, now setting forth on the same exciting quest.
The relation of Christianity to Judaism was as damningly clear to Jewish eyes as it was embarrassingly ambiguous for Christian consciences. In Jewish eyes the Christian Church was a renegade Jewish sect which, on the evidence of its own unauthorized appendix to the Canon of Scripture, had sinned against the teaching of the misguided and unfortunate Galilean Pharisee whose name these traitors to Pharisaism had impudently taken in vain. In Jewish eyes, Christianity’s allegedly miraculous captivation of the Hellenic society was by no means ‘the Lord’s doing’. The posthumous triumph of a Jewish rabbi who had been saluted by his followers, in Gentile style, as the son of a god by a human mother was a pagan exploit of the same order as the earlier triumphs of kindred legendary ‘demigods’ such as Dionysus and Heracles. Judaism flattered herself that she could have anticipated Christianity’s conquests if she had stooped to conquer by, descending to Christianity’s level. Though Christianity had never repudiated the authority of the Jewish Scriptures—indeed, she had bound them up with her own—she had made her facile conquests by betraying, as Jewish eyes saw it, the two cardinal Judaic principles, the First and Second of the Ten Commandments, Monotheism and Aniconism (no ‘images’). So now, in face of a still impenitent Hellenic paganism, plainly visible under a veneer of Christianity, the watchword for Jewry was to persevere in bearing witness to the Lord’s everlasting Word.
This ‘patient deep disdain’ with which a sensationally successful Christianity continued to be regarded by an unimpressed and unshaken Jewry would have been less embarrassing for Christians if Christianity herself had not combined a sincere theoretical loyalty to a Jewish legacy of Monotheism and Aniconism with those practical concessions to the polytheism and idolatry of Hellenic converts for which she was arraigned by her Jewish critics. The Christian Church’s reconsecration of the Jewish Scriptures as the Old Testament of the Christian Faith was a weak spot in Christianity’s armour through which the shafts of Jewish criticism pierced the Christian conscience. The Old Testament was one of the foundation stones on which the Christian edifice rested; but so, too, was the doctrine of the Trinity, the cult of the Saints, and the representation, not only of the Saints but also of the divine Three Persons, in three-dimensional as well as two-dimensional works of visual art. How could Christian apologists answer the Jewish taunt that the Church’s Hellenic practice was irreconcilable with her Judaic theory? Some reply was required which would convince Christian minds that there was no substance in these Jewish arguments, for the tellingness of these arguments lay in the responsive conviction of sin which they evoked in Christian souls.
After the nominal conversion, en masse , of an Hellenic Gentile world in the course of the fourth century of the Christian Era, the domestic controversy within the bosom of the Church tended to overshadow the polemics between Christians and Jews; but the theological warfare on this older front seems to have flared up again in the sixth and seventh centuries in consequence of a puritanical house-cleaning in Jewry which, in the Palestinian Jewish community, had been taken in hand towards the close of the fifth century. This domestic campaign, within Jewry, against a Christian-like laxity in the matter of mural decoration of synagogues had its repercussions on the Jewish-Christian battlefront. But, when we turn to the parallel controversy within the Christian Church between iconophiles and iconophobes, we are struck with its persistence and ubiquity. We find this ‘irrepressible conflict’ bursting out in almost every province of Christendom and in almost every succeeding century of the Christian Era. It is unnecessary here to catalogue a long list of examples beginning with the thirty-sixth canon of the Council of Elvira (circa A.D. 300–11), which forbids the exhibition of pictures in churches.
In the seventh century of the Christian Era a new factor was introduced into the argument in the shape of a new actor who made a sensationally brilliant appearance on the historical stage. Yet another religion now sprang, as Christianity had sprung, but this one full-grown, from the loins of Jewry. Islam was as fanatically monotheist and aniconist as any Jew could desire, and the sensational successes of its devotees in the military—and soon also in the missionary—field gave Christendom something new to think about. Much as the military and missionary triumphs of the devotees of Communism had induced in Modern Western souls a heart-searching reappraisal of traditional Western social and economic arrangements, so the triumphs of the Primitive Muslim Arab conquerors supplied fresh fuel for the controversies that had long been smouldering round the problem of Christian ‘idolatry’.
In A.D. 726 the ghost of a Judaic iconophobia, long hovering in the wings, was brought into the centre of the stage by the Iconoclastic Decree of the great East Roman Emperor, Leo Syrus. This attempt to impose what amounted to a renaissance in the religious field by means of political authority proved a failure. The Papacy identified itself enthusiastically with the popular ‘idolatrous’ opposition, and thereby took a long step towards emancipating itself from Byzantine authority. The subsequent, possibly half-hearted, move made in the West by Charlemagne in the direction of the policy of Leo Syrus received a decisive snub from Pope Hadrian I. The West had to wait nearly eight centuries more for its Judaic renaissance; and when this came it was a movement from below upwards; its Leo Syrus was Martin Luther.
In the Protestant Reformation in Western Christendom, Aniconism was not the only Judaic ghost that succeeded in reasserting itself. A Judaic Sabbatarianism simultaneously captivated the secessionists from the Roman Catholic Church; and the renaissance of this other element in Judaism is less easy to explain, because the extreme meticulousness to which a post-exilic Jewry had carried its observance of its Sabbath was a peculiar people’s response to a peculiar challenge; it was a part of the Jewish diaspora’s technique for preserving its corporate existence. The Protestants’ professed objective was a return to the pristine practice of the Primitive Church; yet here we see them obliterating a difference between Primitive Christianity and Judaism on which the Primitive Church had insisted. Could these ‘Bible Christians’ be unaware of the numerous passages in the Gospels in which Jesus was reported to have defied the Sabbatarian taboo? Could it have escaped their notice that Paul, whom they delighted to honour, had made himself notorious by repudiating the Mosaic Law? The explanation was that these religious enthusiasts, in Germany, England, Scotland, New England, and elsewhere, were in the grip of one of the most potent of renaissances and were bent on turning themselves into imitation-Jews, as enthusiastic Italian artists and scholars had been bent on turning themselves into imitation-Athenians. Their practice of inflicting on their children at baptism some of the most un-Teutonic sounding proper names to be found in the Old Testament was a revealing symptom of this mania for calling a dead world back to life.
We have already introduced, by implication, a third element in the Judaic renaissance of Western Protestantism, namely bibliolatry, the idolization of a sacred text as a substitute for the idolization of sacred images. No doubt, great cultural benefit had accrued, not only to devout Protestants or Puritans, but to Western souls in general, from the translation of the Bible into the vernacular languages and from the constant reading of it by generations of simple people who read very little else. This had immeasurably enriched the vernacular literatures and stimulated popular education. The ‘Bible stories’, over and above whatever might be their religious value, had become a folklore far surpassing in human interest anything available to Western Man from any native source. For a more sophisticated minority, the critical study of the sacred text had been an apprenticeship in a higher criticism which could be, and duly had been, applied thereafter in all fields of scholarship. At the same time the moral and intellectual nemesis of deifying holy scriptures was a Protestant servitude from which a still priest-ridden Tridentine Catholicism had remained free. The determination to regard as the unerring Word of God an Old Testament which was being more and more plainly shown to be a collection, or rather an amalgamation, of human compositions of varying degrees of religious and historical merit, had set a religious premium on an obstinate stupidity which had led Matthew Arnold to accuse the virtuous middle classes of his own Victorian Age of living in a ‘Hebraizing backwater’.
1 The earliest English use of the term cited in O.E.D . is dated A.D. 1845. Matthew Arnold started the practice of anglicizing the word and writing ‘renascence’.
1 Bury, J. B., in his edition of Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire , vol. v (London 1901, Methuen), Appendix II, p. 526.
2 Dawson, Christopher: Religion and the Rise of Western Culture (London1950, Sheed & Ward), p. 90.
1 Dawson, Christopher: Religion and the Rise of Western Culture (London 1950, Sheed & Ward), pp. 90–91.
1 Fung Yu-lan: A Short History of Chinese Philosophy (New York 1948, Macmillan), p. 318.
1 Dawson, Christopher: Religion and the Rise of Western Culture (London
1950, Sheed & Ward), pp. 229–30.
2 Butterfield, H.: The Origins of Modern Science, 1300–1800 (London 1949, Bell), pp. 21–22.
1 This is what the ‘Clerk of Oxenford’, in Chaucer’s Prolog , had, or wished to have, ‘at his beddes head’.
1 Benvenuto Cellini: Autobiography , English translation by J. A. Symonds (London 1949, Phaidon Press), Book I, chapter xii, p. 18.