A world lit only by fire_ the medieval m - William Manchester [58]
Men whose dedication to the papacy extended that far would ultimately come to realize that the humanists were moving in a very different direction. They had begun as pure scholars dedicated to the rediscovery of Latin, and then Greek, classics. But their emphasis on wisdom not derived from religious sources had led them to turn away from the supernatural. They did not reject it—not yet, at any rate not outside Germany. Their movement was still transitional; the change was one of emphasis, toward a new faith which held that man’s happiness and welfare in this lifetime should come first, taking precedence over what might or might not follow it, that mankind’s highest ethical objective is not the salvation of his soul but the earthly good of all humanity.
EVEN AFTER it had become obvious that medieval Christianity and the reawakened reason of the ancient world were on a collision course, the clash was not abrupt. Critics of the new intellectualism approached the issue cautiously, beginning, in an early reference to it, with a straightforward (if restrictive)definition: “The Humanist, I meane him that affects the knowledge of State affairs, Histories, [et cetera].” True believers began to draw a distinction—it was to be observed for more than a century—between “secular writers” (humanists) and “divines,” or “devines” (themselves). Then a scholar was singled out for oblique censure: “I might repute him as a good humanist, but not a good devine.”
By then the divines were ready to fight, and the first quarrel they opened—over higher education—was one the humanists, it seemed, could hardly ignore. Proper university instruction, wrote one cleric, should consist in “deliuering a direct order of construction for the releefe of weake Grammacists, not in tempting by curious deuise and disposition to conte [content] courtly Humanists.” But the flung gauntlet was ignored. Another divine described the spectrum of learning as arching from “the strictest Roman Catholicism,” representing perfection, to “the nakedest humanism.” This too provoked no response. An abusive reference to “heathen-minded Humanists” was followed by another, to “their system—usually called Humanism,” which, the writer explained, sought “to level all family distinctions, all differences of rank, all nationality, all positive moral obligations, all positive religion, and to train all mankind to be as … the highest accomplishment.” These were absurd charges, easily refuted, but no learned scholar bothered to do it, and the divines, never an intellectual match for those they sought to draw, were reduced to limning the plight of a man bereft of his soul: “With the accession of humanistic ideas, he had lost all belief in the Christian religion.”
Although the issue was profound, discussion of it remained a monologue. The humanists were hardly inarticulate; they were merely reserving their concern for immediate issues, such as the gross abuse of authority in the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Here the divines tried to intervene as amicus curiae. One asked sarcastically: “What a Discovery is it … that Vice raged at Court? Is it but the Hackney Observation of all Humanists?” In a sense it was exactly that; eminent spokesmen for humanism were discovering vice in parishes, dioceses, monastic orders, and, above all, in the Holy See, and if they sounded hackneyed it was because repetition is unavoidable when the same offenses turn up again and again.
Reflective men make uncomfortable prosecutors. By nature and by training, they tend to see the other side and give it equal weight. Clerical misconduct aroused the anger of some humanists, but others, bred to be devout, found the matter disturbing. They searched for compromises, envying painters and sculptors who could overlook the goings-on in Rome. Not all artists did, however. The shrewdest of them, aware that the papacy was spending fortunes on Vatican art even as famine stalked