"The Humanists: A Chapter from History" (Brownson's Quarterly Review for January, 1859)

There are epochs in history wherein the causes that have been silently but steadily working for centuries, suddenly combine, and by their untied action bring forth results, which influence the destiny of the human race for ages; such epochs, standing out in bold relief, serve as centers, around which the various events of the period revolve, kept within their sphere by force of moral attraction, even when inclined, by their own nature, to rove as comets, unchained by law, through the sphere of history. And hence the necessity of studying and appreciating such epochs, in order to the right understanding of historical events. For if these events are viewed by themselves, detached from those that precede and those that follow them, we shall never know history. An amount of disconnected and useless information will be at best all that we can obtain. History, properly so called, must be philosophical; that is, must show events in their principle, and in their relation of causes and effects. The historian, as the mathematician, must have the center from which to describe the circumference. “Give me a point whereon to place my fulcrum, and I will move the earth,” said Archimedes of old; let the historian find the idea that colors the age, and he holds in his hands all the threads, minute and finely interlaced as they may be, that join together facts and events in a union, imperceptible to the casual student.

This fact is frequently lost sight of, and hence popular history is in general unphilosophical and untrustworthy. Some attempt to remedy the evil by writing what they choose to call the Philosophy of History. They are correct in principle, and would succeed if they came at the hidden causes of the events in man’s history. But for want of clear understanding of first principles, and of a sound philosophical education, they, in most instances, lamentably fail. Guizot undertook to write the history of Civilization in Europe, but he suffered religious and political prejudices to bias his judgment, and his work, for from elucidating the subject, tends but to lead into error those who allow themselves to be dazzled by the brilliancy of his style, and the apparent depth of his views. There has been one glorious exception to this general censure, the great Bossuet, the Eagle of Meaux, who, from the pinnacle of Catholic truth, surveying with the eye of the Christian philosopher and statesman, the various nations of antiquity, has written their history with an accuracy and an eloquence that have remained as yet unrivalled. His Universal History alone would make his name immortal.

Much remains to be done in the field of modern European history. Particular periods have been treated in a masterly manner, such as that of the so-called Reformation, by the illustrious Balmes, the age of Gregory VII by Voight, and that of Innocent III by Hurter; but the philosophic history of the Middle Ages or the period from the inroads of the northern barbarians to the time of Luther, is yet to be written. In default of a great work of the kind by the hand of a Christian and a philosopher, the subject has been treated either as a whole, or in parts, by men possessing talents of a high order, vast and varied information, a style to which a vivid imagination has imparted all its charms, in short every thing but a sound philosophy in harmony with Christian principles. Their works are read and accepted as the philosophy of history. Guizot, Cousin, Roscoe, Macaulay, and even Ranke, are examples in point. When the streams of knowledge flow from such infected sources, can we wonder at the prevalence of so many false notions of history? Historians writing for the people servilely copy these masters, and hence error is more and more propagated.

To the history of nor period will these remarks so well apply as to that of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. These centuries, distinguished by two most important events, the Revival of Letters and the Protestant Reformation, have ever been popular themes with the popular writer, whether historian, poet, or novelist. The Revival of Letters, an event of great interest to every man making any pretensions to taste or scholarship, has been treated by some the most distinguished men in modern literature, among whom we may name Roscoe in his Life of Leo X, and of Lorenzo de Medici, and Hallam in his History of Literature. To enumerate the writers and books on the Reformation, would be an endless task. Appealing to all the passions of the human heart, interwoven from its very beginnings with all the political movements of Europe, it would be vain to attempt unravelling the web of European history, without understanding the character, the causes, and the effects of this great event. The Revival of Letters and the Reformation are closely connected both in time and character. Protestants claim the glory of the former event, but the Humanists have as much right to glory in having aided the birth of Protestantism. The union between the Reformers and the Humanists was more intimate than is commonly imagined, more intimate than they themselves were aware of. They were often at war with each other about words and forms, but at bottom their principles were the same. If Erasmus sneered at the early Reformers, because their first step in the career of Protestantism was the taking of a wife, but he showed his inconsistency by rejecting the practical consequences of his own principles. He, as well as they, was disposed to make too much of human reason as opposed to the authority of the Church, and the rejection of that authority, when followed to its logical consequences, leads invariably to the same result.

The Revival of Learning, as it is called, is a subject of peculiar interest and importance in an age which boasts of its transcendent progress in mental enlightenment, a subject whose very name tends to enlist our sympathies. The Revival of Learning! Is not learning opposed to ignorance? And is not ignorance the curse of the mind, the thick mist that shrouds its intellectual vision from the rays of truth and leaves it to grope in darkness? But is there not, in the words of the inspired Apostle, “a knowledge, a leaning, that puffeth up,” that is opposed to Christian charity and truth? Was not this, after all, the leaning, the Revival of which is so loudly boasted?

Before proceeding to the discussion of this question, we must be allowed to glance for a moment at the influence of authority in matters of faith, exercised by the Church, on the human mind in general, and on literature in particular. We may thus obtain a clue to the character of the literature of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and its bearing on that of our own times.

God is true, is truth itself, and when he speaks, men must listen and obey, whether the things he speaks or reveals pertain to the natural order, or to the supernatural; whether within the reach of the natural understanding, or mysteries lying beyond its comprehension, his authority is complete, is all that reason, without ceasing to be reason, can demand, and, therefore, exacts of reason a full and unreserved assent, a perfect and entire submission. But, aside from the body of truth divinely revealed, man is free to examine for himself, by the light of his natural reason, all facts, opinions, and theories he meets, and accept or reject them according to the evidence in the case. As God cannot reveal, in the natural or the supernatural order, what is not true, whatever varies from, or is repugnant to, his revelation must be false; for truth is one, and cannot oppose or contradict itself. Natural truth and supernatural truth, proceed from the same source, and can never be opposed, in the slightest degree, one to the other. What is consonant to revelation or harmonizes with it, is true, and nothing is to be rejected as false, which is not repugnant either to it or to reason. The written expression of men’s sentiments, convictions, and opinions, in accordance with revealed truth, constitutes a true Christian literature.

As God has entrusted to his Church the guardianship of supernatural, and to a certain point of natural truth, since the supernatural presupposes the natural, it follows, that to the Church belongs the duty of watching over men, in their intellectual operations, inquiries, investigations, to see that they do not pass beyond their legitimate province, that they do not arrogate to reason the right to decide, as supreme judge, on things which lie above her sphere, and substitute the fancies of mere private judgment for the truth of God. Literature, then, in all its departments, must be under the guardianship of the Church, or else, owing to the incapacity of reason by itself, to attain to truth of the supernatural order, and the natural impatience of the human mind, under restraint of any kind, it will lose the supernatural and become purely natural and heathenish.

Nor is the free action of the mind impaired by this guardianship of the Church, for it extends only to the preservation of the truth which God has revealed. The history of literature shows, at least, as many glorious names among the devoted and submissive children of the Church, as can be found in the ranks of heresy. Did the principle of authority asserted and applied by the Church, impede the progress of philosophy? Let facts answer. Truth was the object of the ardent pursuit of the ancient philosophers, but ever did it elude their grasp. God, nature, man, and society, were problems which they agitated, which tormented them, and which they were never able to solve. But when revelation came to the aid of reason, and gave it a clear knowledge of God and his creation, human genius, enabled to perceive distinctly the sure data on which to work, reared the stately and well-proportioned fabric of Christian philosophy. St. Augustine, St. Anselm, and St. Thomas were great philosophers as well as eminent theologians, and tower head and shoulders above all in ancient or modern times. All true science in the natural order is contained in philosophy as in its germ, and if the germ or seed be preserved intact, the plant must needs be of vigorous and healthy growth. Hence history, philology, and even the natural sciences, have met with proper treatment at the hands of those only who have been humble and obedient children of the Church. And the fine arts, do they not own all they possess of good and beautiful to the faithful copying of Christian truth? A firm belief in the truths of revelation reared the glorious cathedrals of the middle ages, whose lofty spires and pointed arches symbolize the aspirations of the soul for Heaven. Whence did the early Italian painters and sculptors draw their inspirations? The Annunciation of Cimabue, the Last Supper of Leonardo da Vinci, the Judgment of Michel Angelo, the Transfiguration of Raphael, and the Dome of St. Peter’s, that wonder of Christian art, show that in every case, revealed religion alone imparted that degree of surpassing and almost superhuman beauty, for which they are so justly admired, to those grand efforts of human genius. All Italy is full of monuments, attesting how much the element of true, artistic beauty pervades religion.

It is vain, then, to say, that strict submission to religious truth clips the wings and impedes the flight of genius. Literature and the arts can never suffer by being under the protection and guardianship of the Church. Without her, they fast degenerate, lose that grandeur and beaty which she alone can impart, represent the mere natural life of man, and lead him farther and farther from his end, - his Supreme Good. But while the Church exacts from those who form the literature of a period, or contribute to it when already formed, a strict adherence to her teachings, she allows and even encourages them to use all the graces and beauties of language, to press into their service every department of human science and leaning, or, in the words of one of the Fathers of the Church, “to seize on the spoil of Egypt, to consecrate it to God, and to adorn, with its wealth, the tabernacle of the Church.”

At the period of the Church’s foundation, literature was in one of its glorious eras. The notes from the harmonious lyres of Virgil, Horace, and Ovid, were yet lingering on the ear. Grecian philosophy had yet taken up its abode in Imperial Rome, and the great masters of Grecian history and poetry had long since been known to the conquerors. But the Church could find no opportunity, during three centuries of bloodshed and persecution, of breathing into the lifeless, though beautiful form of Pagan literature, a Christian soul. And when she issued from the dark recesses of the Catacombs, and mounted in triumph the imperial throne, an age of literary barbarism was fast obliterating the traces of the Augustan period. Alexandria had succeeded Athens and Rome, as the capital of the literary world. To her schools flocked philosophers from the east and the west- the polished Greek, to whom Plato was the philosopher, by excellence, the divine, the master, and the dreamy oriental, with his infinite variety of myths of every shade and hue, of Buddhism, Manichaeism, or Zoroastrianism. A common hatred of Christianity united elements so heterogenous, and from their union sprang Neoplatonism, which under the shadow of the imperial throne of Julian the Apostate, proved the most formidable antagonist that Christianity had yet encountered. It was the natural at war with the supernatural, human nature refusing to submit to any yoke, intellectual or moral. All the human learning that the world yet possessed, was banded together for the destruction of the Church; in a word, it was the first great struggle between intellectual paganism and Christianity.

Side by side with this pagan literature arose sacred literature, its direct antagonist. St. Justin, Origen, and Clement of Alexandria met and confuted on their own ground and with their own weapons the Alexandrian Philosophers; they adapted the Platonic philosophy to Christian truth, and with it, shattered at one blow the huge but imbecile fabric of Neoplatonism. Their works are treasures of Philosophy, and surpass those of their opponents as much in beauty of thought and style as in strength of argument. Their illustrious successors, St Basil and St Gregory Nazianzen, brought to bear on the contest a theological learning the most profound, and a thorough acquaintance with all the tenets of the schools, whilst they clothed their thoughts in the garb of a chaste classic style, fruit of a perfect familiarity with the great writers of antiquity. And hence they have ever ranked amongst the first and most eloquent of Christian poets and orators.

The schools of the Neoplatonists were closed by the Emperor Justinian in the sixth century, but the spirit that they had evoked made its influence more or less perceptibly felt in every age. The old Alexandrian Philosophy was too flattering to human nature to be given up without a struggle. Proclaiming all forms of Religion to be good, and that from their amalgamation springs the one, true, and universal Religion, they brought religion within the natural sphere, and from being something supernatural, made it a mere system of Philosophy. The Alexandrian spirit lived on through the night of the Middle Ages, the representative of the human element in literature, waiting but the favorable opportunity of developing itself in a completely secular and pagan literature, which was to acknowledge no authority in intellectual matters but individual reason. It appeared in Scotus Erigena, Roscelin, and Abelard, who not content with expounding the truths of faith in philosophic language, would make Aristotle and not the Church the standard of authority, when they would make faith stand her trial at reason’s tribunal.

The Church, whilst she wept over these errors of her children, faithful to her divine commission, condemned their doctrine,- condemned the perversion they made of philosophy, not philosophy itself, as our adversaries would fain have us believe. Had she not availed herself of this very philosophy of Aristotle to arrange and teach systematically the body of Christian truths contained, but in no methodical order, in the Sacred Scripture and in the writings of the Fathers? Is it not in this adaptation of Philosophy to Revelation that scholastic theology owes its origin and the terrible force it has against the enemies of truth? Many there were who abused the system, who delighting in subtle metaphysical disquisitions and crude speculations, made skill in dialectics the summum bonum of life. But the Church never acknowledged these idle subtle sophists, these hair-splitting dialecticians as her schoolmen, her scholastic theologians. She left them to their barren speculations and their interminable wranglings, for a higher and nobler work, of winning souls to Christ, of converting yet the semi-barbarian hordes who had founded their kingdoms on the ruins of the Roman Empire. We cannot wonder then that theology was the only branch of literature to which the Church devoted her chief attention at the time, for it was the only one she needed in the work of conversion and civilization.

Meanwhile the perverters of true Philosophy and Theology, the disciples of Roscelin and Abelard, manifested the spirit which actuated them. It was not a zeal for letters, for true mental progress, but the desire of shaking off the yoke of wholesome authority, whereby the Church marked a line beyond which they could not pass with impunity in their rash inquiries. Whenever and wherever the secular power, in the persons of the princes of Europe, arrogated to itself a supremacy over the spiritual, thus inverting the order of God’s providence, these proud self-sufficient philosophers invariably espoused its cause. Who were the men that in the fourteenth century supported and encouraged Louis of Bavaria in bidding defiance to the Church in the person of three of her Sovereign Pontiffs, in setting himself above all law, but that of his own royal pleasure? Were they not Occam and his disciples, the receivers of Nominalism, that system of philosophy which Roscelin had taught more than two centuries before? Did not the French kings find too often, among the Doctors of the Sorbonne, faithful friends and supporters in their iniquitous resistance to the authority of the Popes? When the proud Barbarossa dreamed in his wild ambition of wielding an authority, to which even the old pagan emperors, absolute as they were, were strangers; when he would have every knee on earth, of Priest and Bishop, of King and Pope, bow to him, whom did he find to sanction his monstrous assumptions, but the learned men of Italy, Jurists of Bologna!

Such, during the Middle Ages, was the spirit of Philosophy, as separated from Theology, and cultivated solely for itself. Lighter literature was in no better state. If Philosophy was human and pagan, because it refused to recognize the Church as the guardian and judge of reason, the poetry of the Troubadours and Trouveres, of the Minnesingers and Meistersingers, was human and pagan, because it refused to recognize the Church as the guardian of morals, because it appealed to human passions unregenerated by grace, combining the sensualism and the voluptuousness of the Moors and the Arabs with the fantastic and grim superstitions of the Scandinavians. It differed in nothing, but in want of the same classic style, from the poetry of the most refined and sensual of the Greek and Roman bards. These were the germs from which was to be developed in later times a pagan literature more polished, more captivating, and more dangerous.

Meanwhile the drama of European history was becoming more and more intricate in its plot, was acquiring every day deeper and deeper interest; causes that had been long silently working, began to manifest themselves, and produce their natural effects. The Papal See was removed from Rome to Avignon, during the pontificate of Clement V, in 1307, but the papacy was never at home on French soil (*Avignon was not French soil, or within the kingdom of France, at that time), and like a tender, transplanted flower drooped and pined for the more genial clime of Italy. Rome, deserted by the Popes, was shorn of half her glories, and knew too late, that all her fame, all her proud pre-eminence of power were linked inseparably to the Chair of Peter. Many and frequent were the deputations that solicited the return of the sovereign Pontiffs. But the storm of war sweeping with destructive fury over the plains of Italy imposed an almost imperative necessity for the prolongation of the French residence, or as it has been sometimes called, the “Babylonian captivity of the Church.” When, finally, the Popes in the person of Gregory XI, after an absence of more than seventy years, resumed their residence in the holy city, Rome had sadly dwindled down both in power and population. During the glorious pontificate of Innocent III, in the beginning of the thirteenth century, there existed of the monuments of antiquity twelve triumphal arches, eleven baths, and three hundred and sixty-one towers. When Gregory returned, the ruins of three or four of the baths remained. This fact alone speaks volumes for the influence of the Papacy upon the Roman States and upon all Italy merely in an artistic and civilizing point of view.

The effect of the long absence of the Popes upon the inhabitants of Rome was one of marked interest and importance. Day by day they saw the glories of their beloved city fade, her power decrease, each repeated and earnest request for the return of the Holy Father met with a refusal or vague and indeterminate promises. Cut off, as it seemed, forever, from the hopes of future fame and power, founded on her being the capital of the Christian world, Rome turned with all the more fervency to the memories of her past glories. The monuments of pagan antiquity were around her, she remembered that she had been the imperial mistress of the world, and she indulged the fond hope of again becoming the queen of nations, even separated from the Apostolic See and in open schism with it. The history of Rienzi proved the fallacy of her hopes, and with the last of the tribunes the sun of Rome’s political domination sank forever. But the enthusiasm of the adventurer Rienzi for the glories of pagan Rome, deposited a seed which was to produce the most pernicious and deadly fruit. The Romans became discontented with themselves, factious and impatient of all authority, whether of Pope or Emperor. They began to look upon the paganism, of which their city was once the political, literary, and religious centre, as something to be prized for itself, as something more glorious for Rome than the fact of being the See of St. Peter and his successors. This thought once conceived and cherished, was developed by every thing around them. The temples of heathen gods and goddesses, the arches, theaters and baths which, when viewed with a Christian eye, were standing memorials of the glorious triumphs of the Church over the mighty fabric of paganism, of the divinity of Christianity, served now as incentives of an excessive admiration of paganism.

The reverence for authority, at which the career of Rienzi aimed so deadly a blow, was still more weakened by the unhappy schism of the West. To the true child of the Church, the contemplation of this sad period causes sorrow, not unmingled, however, with exultation and gratitude; sorrow, for the wickedness and impiety of men who dared intrude themselves into the sanctuary of the living God, and even into the throne of the Sovereign Pontiff; exultation, at the glorious spectacle of the Church, coming unscathed out of the fiery ordeal, brighter and more beautiful, if possible, than ere she entered the purifying flames; gratitude, for the grace of being a member of this Holy, catholic and Apostolic Church, so evidently upheld by the hand of the Almighty.

Such was the situation of Europe in the middle of the fifteenth century. The historic causes of the period were all tending to produce one grand effect, the full development of the natural as opposed to the supernatural, of paganism as opposed to Christianity. The fall of the Greek Empire of Constantinople, in 1453, before the arms of Mahomet II, was the last link in the historic chain of causes. The degenerate Greeks, separated, excepting brief intervals of partial union, for ages from the communion of the Church, had become virtually pagan. (*This remark need qualification, save when applied to a certain number of Greek scholars) The works of the old Greek authors were known and cherished amongst them as souvenirs of the past greatness of their ancestors. The learned men of Greece, flying from the cruelty and oppression of their Muslim conquerors, were received with open arms by the princes and literary men of Europe, especially of Italy. They introduced a passionate admiration for the literature of ancient Greece, and aided the Italians in recovering and understanding the works of classic Roman antiquity.
The superior acquirements of the refugees placed them at the head of the literary world, gave them admission to the courts of princes, and to the first chairs in the universities. Greeks were the lions of the day, in much the same manner as European Red Republicans are the lions of the nineteenth century. This is the event, this is the epoch in history, which is called the Revival of Letters.

To come to a right understanding of this most important subject, let us see what is conceded, what denied, by the partisans of the Revival. They grant that it directed the attention of the learned to the cultivation of Greek and Latin literature, to a predilection for Greek and Latin pagan authors, and to an imitation of their beauties. They stoutly deny that the Revival had any thing but a most salutary and enlightening influence upon the human mind and upon the destiny of Europe. They also maintain that Christianity suffered nothing, but by that they mean fashionable or liberal Christianity, another name for heathenism. Now, on the side of truth, if we examine the philosophy, the system of politics, the belles-lettres, and the fine arts, to which the Revival gave birth, we shall find that its influence has been pernicious, and that with the style and manner of the heathen classic writers, things good in themselves, to which the Church has never objected, and never will object, it introduced their pagan thoughts and sentiments, and finally resulted in pure, unmitigated heathenism, not that which bows down before and adores gods of wood and stone, but that which makes man and man’s passions and aspirations its God. For it savors as much of paganism and even of atheism to deny God as the final cause, as to deny him as the first cause.

At the period of the Revival, Aristotle was the oracle of the philosophic world; but his disciples were divided into separate and opposite classes; those who, with St. Thomas, adopted his method as the most convenient for the elucidation and explanation of Christian truths, and those who unhesitatingly subscribed to all the Stagyrite’s philosophic doctrines, as explained by Arabian commentators. The latter class, to be consistent with the dictum of their master, “Nihil est in intellectu, quod prius non fuerit in sensu,” “Nothing is in the intellect, that was not firstly in the senses,” must sooner or later have become empiricists, or sensists, and materialists. The Greek refugees gave a new direction to the philosophic controversies of the day. Plato was their standard of excellence, as Aristotle was of the Latins or Westerns; but it was Plato as explained by Plotinus and the Alexandrians, or in other words, their system was that Neoplatonism, which we have seen make such a formidable stand against the Church in the early ages. Plato’s doctrine of ideas gave full scope to the mind to indulge in wild and fanciful speculations concerning the preexisting state of souls, and hence led to a mysticism, which must of necessity degenerate into rationalism, whilst his doctrine of the creation and of the soul of the world was purely pantheistic. The Greek Neoplatonists nowhere received a warmer welcome than in Florence. Gemisthus Pletho there established a Platonic academy, during the administration of Cosmo de Medici, which, under the reign of his successor, Lorenzo the Magnificent, became the centre of all literary movements and the oracle of the literary world. Marsilius Ficinus, a man as remarkable for his wearied industry as for his genius, was its director. Marsilius, in his comments upon Plato, manifests the spirit which actuated the school of which he was the Master and Representative. He sees in the Athenian philosopher, the foreshadowings of the great Christian mysteries of the Trinity, the Redemption, and even of the Blessed Eucharist. Some years later, in 1512, we find the fifth General Council of Lateran, under Leo X, condemning the opinion that the immortality of the soul could not be proved by reason, or in other words that what was true in theology could be false in philosophy, therefore that truth could be opposed to itself. This opinion when considered in connection with the legitimate deductions from the system of Ficinus, throws grave doubt on the doctrine of the immortality, and hence on the greatest sanction of the natural and positive law, and paves the way to anarchy and crime. Such was the result of the disputes of the Platonists and Aristotelians, and in this respect the philosophy of the Revival led immediately and of itself to the Deism of the English Philosophers, the materialism and eclecticism of the French, the Rationalism of the Germans, and the Transcendentalism of the New Englanders. Separate philosophy from theology, and it becomes a most potent engine of error and absurdity.

What was the system of Politics which the Revival originated and fostered? Consult the pages of Nicholas Machiavelli, the secretary of the Florentine Republic, who, like all the literary men of the day, was deeply tinctured with the spirit of classic paganism. His system of politics is essentially unchristian,- it is even diabolical. “The end justifies the means,” is his motto. The end is the aggrandizement of the price; the means, whatever attains that end, whether it be good or bad. The prince is to play the virtuous man, the lion, or the fox, as best suits the occasion. He is to have no fixed principles and his actions with every shifting circumstance. In theory, men may detest political Machiavellianism, but the history of modern diplomacy shows beyond a shadow of doubt, that statemen follow in practice the maxims of the Florentine secretary, not those of our Blessed Lord and Savior. As private gentlemen, they may be staid, regularly meeting-going Protestants;* as diplomatists, they are the verist heathens, without the least idea of right or wrong, justice or injustice. (*Unhappily nominally Catholic diplomatists do not seem to do much better than Protestant diplomatists)

The only safety for the political or temporal order, as for the spiritual, is submission to legitimate authority. But the Humanists, the Revivalists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, opposed such submission both in theory and practice. Let us listen to one of their oracles: “Turn over the pages of ancient or modern history, scarcely in several generations will you find one or two princes whose folly has not inflicted the greatest misery on mankind. Let any physiognomist, not a blunderer in his trade, consider the look and features of an eagle, those rapacious and wicked eyes, that threatening curve of the beak, those cruel cheeks, that stern front, will he not at once recognize the image of a king, a magnificent and majestic king? Add to these a dark, ill-omened color, an unpleasing, dreadful, appalling voice, and that threatening scream, at which every kind of animal trembles. Every one will acknowledge this type, who has learned how terrible are the threats of princes, even uttered in jest. At this scream of the eagle, the people tremble, the senate shrinks, the nobility cringes, the judges concur, the divines are dumb, the lawyers assent, the laws and constitution give way; neither right nor religion, neither justice nor humanity avails. And thus whilst there are so many birds of sweet and melodious song, the unpleasant and unmusical scream of the eagle alone has more power than all the rest. Oh, race of the Bruti, long since extinct!- oh, blind and blunted thunderbolts of Jupiter!” This is the language of Erasmus, the greatest of the Humanists, the Voltaire of his age. Could the most radical of our modern liberals pen lines more bitter and sarcastic? They are aimed not only at the kingly form of government, but at the government of law as opposed to that of license. The civil and religious wars which devastated Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the rising of the Anabaptists in Germany and of the Huguenots in France, were but practical applications of the doctrines of the Humanists, and their friends, the Reformers.

With principles like these, we cannot expect to find the Humanists practicing, to any heroic degree, the virtue of loyalty. History shows that they did not. When Ferdinand of Aragon, the lawful sovereign of Naples, was forced, in 1494, to abandon his throne to Charles VIII of France, the members of the Neapolitan academy, one of the most celebrated in Italy, counting amongst its members the names of Sannazar, Pontanus, and Carateo, almost to a man, paid their service court to the conqueror; an injustice of unparalleled ingratitude, as Ferdinand had been one of the most generous patrons of letters. In fact, mere literary characters have never been remarkable for their loyalty. They have too often showed themselves inclined to prostitute their talents and their pens to his service who could best pay and patronize them, be he the lawful prince or a usurper, the father of his people or their tyrant.

Such was the spirit of the Revival in connection with moral and political Philosophy. Its effect upon art was not less characteristic. “Art,” to use the words of a modern writer, “is the expression of the true and the good under the form of the beautiful.” Truth is whatever is, since as God alone is Absolute Being, he alone is Absolute Truth, and therefore, he alone is the absolute object of art, in its relation to the true. Created beings are its object only relatively, inasmuch as they depend on God, and copy him in their existence and operations, and hence the closer they are connected with God, and the more godlike they are, the more properly are they the objects of art. Hence, the sacred mysteries of our religion have even been favorite themes of all true artists. Truth is the object of the intellect, goodness of the will, and beauty of the imagination. Hence art, to be perfect, must unite truth, goodness, and beauty. When possessing these characteristics, it wonderfully tends to exalt and ennoble man’s rational and moral nature.

Had the art to which the Revival gave birth these qualities? In its very beginning, the intellectual movement of the fifteenth century departed, in a great degree, from truth, by rejecting even in matters of literature, the principle of authority. It set itself up as antagonistic to sacred art and literature, or, as the Humanists called it, to the barbarism of the Aristotelians. It excluded God and religion from art, and hence, narrowed its circle to created beings, thus separating truth, which is indivisible, and making relative truth absolute truth, or, in other words, asserting the total independence of the temporal order on the spiritual, or that the world, the creature, does not depend on God, the Creator. The muse no longer winged its flight to the throne of God. The uncreated splendor of the Divinity, the glory of the Virgin Mother of God, of the Saints and Angels, were themes too common for the paganized poet of the fifteenth century. Olympus was his heaven, and the Gods of Homer and Virgil, and the heroes of ancient fables, were his standards of excellence. Poor fool! Why did he forget that whatever of beauty pertains to the heathen works of art, was the consequence of a faithful copying of religion such as the heathens had retained it? Take away the element of religion and their beauty disappears. Why did he not reflect, that if he had cast his work in the mold of religion, it would have come forth as far surpassing in true poetic beauty the works of the heathens, as Christianity surpasses heathenism? The Humanists discarded religion; hence, they had to fall back upon the natural order alone, and, as a necessary consequence, they had to appeal to that in the natural order which most interests and captivates. Their works became the expressions of human passions, unelevated and unregenerated by grace. Sensual love was the common and, at the same time, the highest theme of the Latin and Italian muse. Hallam, speaking of the literature of the period, says: “The number of versifiers whom Italy produced in the sixteenth century was immensely great. Crescimbeni gives a list of eighty earlier than 1550, whom he selects from many hundred ever-forgotten names. By far the larger proportion of these confined themselves to the sonnet, and the canzone or ode; and the theme is generally love. A conventional phraseology, an interminable repetition of the beauties and coldness of, perhaps, an ideal, certainly to us an unknown mistress, ran through these productions.” In its infancy, Italian literature was sullied with the expression of a base and sinful passion. Petrarch, the father of Italian popular poetry, in his impassioned addresses to his mistress Laura, was one of the first to touch the string of love’s lyre, whose soft and voluptuous vibrations have continued to our own day. His disciple, Boccaccio, performed in prose what Petrarch had effected in poetry. The shameless licentiousness of his thought, and the classic grace and elegance of his style, unsurpassed by any Italian prose-writer, won for him an epithet before applied to the court poet of the Emperor Nero, “auctor purissimae impuritatis,” “author of a most pure impurity.” The Italian writers of later periods have but too often followed in the steps of their predecessors.

Among the Humanists, there were some for whom love possessed no charms. A less degrading, though no less tyrannic passion swayed them, pride. Puffed up with self-conceit, the baneful fruit, which an exclusive attention to literary labors often produces, they would have every knee to bow to them, as the oracles of the intellectual world, and viewed every successful production, every harvest of praise, of some fellow-litterateur, as a blow aimed at their own reputation. They made no efforts to conceal their sentiments, and their writings breathe spleen and envy on every page. The academies resounded with the angry altercations of the Humanists, and the press teemed with lampoons and satires. The greatest geniuses of the time indulged in these disgraceful squabbles, and thought it no loss of time or reputation to write entire books for the sole purpose of vindicating their own character, and lowering that of a rival. The quarrels of Erasmus and Budaeus of Valla and Poggio, and of the academies of rival cities, are well known in literary history. In allusion to these disgraceful facts, it has been wittily remarked that the literary men of the period had two merits, “that they gave expression to the most truthful accusations in a most polished and brilliant style.” The egotism of the Humanists led many of them to become fawning flatterers of the princes of Europe. What pages of manuscripts, what learned labor, how much aching of the brains, how many sleepless nights, has it not cost to trace some royal pedigree, or hymn the deeds of some petty Italian despot! These court poets received their full share of royal and princely patronage, but at the expense of their poetic fame and immortality, their cumbrous lines are no longer read, and their names are well-nigh forgotten.

Against this abuse of literature, and the consequent depravity of manners, the Church constantly raised her voice. Hence, the Rock of Peter became the mark against which the Humanists directed all the shafts of their wit, satire, and calumny. When not singing the praises of their mistresses, or abusing their rivals, they were exclaiming against the tyranny and abuses of the Papacy. And yet it would seem, that common gratitude should have silenced their lying tongues. Ill had they fared with the generous patronage of a Nicholas IV or a Leo X.

The humanism or naturalism of the Revival was the effect of those causes the workings of which we have already described. Viewed as a cause itself, it tended to produce a still greater disregard for the authority of the Church, a still greater demoralization of manners. The Humanists faithfully depicted in their conduct the effect of the principles inculcated in their writings. If Hutten and Boccaccio were remarkable in an age of immortality for the disgusting licentiousness of their productions, it was because they, more than their compeers, were slaves to the demon impurity. Hutten, the author of the “Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum,” a work as distinguished for its immorality as for its effect in hastening and extending the Protestant Reformation, died the victim of his criminal excesses. Florence was the centre of the Revival, but Florence, thanks to the Medici, and the paganism of the poets and painters, seemed no longer a Christian city. Her magnificent churches still existed, but their altars and walls were desecrated by paintings, breathing nought of devotion, and serving but to fix the mind and heart on natural beauty. Painters still represented the Madonna, but their model was not those features of unearthly beauty, whose dim outlines might have been stamped on pure hearts when dwelling in pious mediation on the glories of Mary, but the form and figure of the goddesses of Olympus, and- can we believe the sacrilege- of worldly beauties, whose charms had involved many an incautious soul in the toils of Satan! An eloquent Catholic writer remarks that the “Madonnas which were placed in domestic oratories, so far from edifying the family that assembled in them to pray, often produced the most contrary effect; and if a pious citizen, out of paternal solicitude, expressed his dissatisfaction with these lascivious representations, and asked for a virgin whose expression and age and character should be a preservative against every thought of impurity, then the perverse artist painted him one with a long beard.”

These are some of the facts tending to illustrate the character of the Revival of letters. The spirit of revolt against the Church, joined to the coincident downfall of the Greek Empire and the reviving taste for classic studies, a taste pursued too far, led to pure unmitigated paganism in literature, art, and life. Men thought that they were made only for this world, and hence they lived and thought and wrote for this world only. The natural order was declared independent of the supernatural; literature became purely natural, and led man farther and farther away from the end for which he was created. The character that literature acquired in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries it has ever since retained. Philosophy has become materialistic and pantheistic. History has ceased to be a vehicle of facts; it serves as a peg on which our modern sages hang their crude, dangerous, and infidel theories. Poetry appeals to the worst passions of human nature. Witness the works of Byron, Moore, and Shelley, modern England’s favorite poets, or when it would soar higher with the muse of Wordsworth, it sings the beauties of external nature, of mountain, valley, ocean, brook, or shy, as if there existed no fairer, no more glorious world than this. And as for art, it has well-nigh perished before the inroads of naturalism. They, in whose bosoms still glows the fire of true genius, must needs consult the models of Catholic Italy, before their productions can be called true works of art, and those models too which breathe nothing of the spirit of Revival. And what is the child of the Church to do, beset on his first entrance into life by these philosophic, poetic, and artistic errors? If he would become acquainted with the literature of the age, he must have a soul of iron, not to receive baneful impressions from the worldly uncatholic spirit which pervades it. Is he to jeopardize his peace of conscience for this? Literature is never to be cultivated for itself, as an end, but solely as a means of leading the soul to heaven. When it conducts to the broad road to hell, it is bad to be avoided, no matter how Christian or faultlessly artistic it may be in form. Young Catholics, captivated by the charms, and misled by the false maxims of a worldly literature, have become lukewarm in the practice of their religion. We must have a Catholic literature or none at all.

Thank Heaven, the prospects are brightening, and if a few of the gifted minds that adorn the American Church were to devote their heart and soul to the noble work of creating a Catholic literature, it would be formed, and it would prosper. Are the friends of God to be less zealous than the friends of the Devil? Can religion no longer produce works characterized by at least as much genius as those of the world? Do our Churches and our tabernacles, in which our Lord abides in the Sacrament of His love, breathe less of the spirit of art than the polluted works of pagan antiquity? We will not believe it. Let Catholic writers draw their inspiration from their faith, instead of the profane literature of the day, let them fill their hearts and expand their souls with the truth, the love, the beauty, the grandeur which belong to their religion, and they will produce works of art, which will attract the admiration of their countrymen, adorn their country, elevate and purify its civilization.

Every age has its own wants and its own modes of action. This age, above all this country, demands literature, and through literature lies the road to its intellect, above all to its heart. It is for us Catholics to take the lead in a literature that will counteract the false literature of the day, that will free the mind and the heart, above all the imagination, from the prevailing paganism, inspire noble and manly sentiments, enlarge the mental horizon, and fulfil the promise of our American civilization. We can do it; all we want is to feel that the work needs to be done, and to engage with earnestness and zeal in effecting it. We must open our hearts to the sun of truth which shines for us, contemplate the glorious acts of our long line of Catholic ancestors, and awaken in ourselves the heroic spirit that loves the combat with darkness and evil; we have, in a word, but to give fair play to the intellect and genius which God so freely gives to those who will employ them for just and noble ends, and we have literature, art in all its departments, not discreditable to our religion and glorious to our country.

We shall have it. We see on every side of us proofs of a new and creative spirit moving in the heart of our Catholic community. Let each take heart and hope, and do the part Gid gives him to do.