The Day the Universe Changed - James Burke [31]
This concentration on the human rather than the divine, an attitude which became known as humanist, was to characterise the next hundred years of Florentine and European thought. The new type of man lived a life that was positive, a life full of the beauty and dignity inherent in the natural world. Man was now thought capable of finding his own salvation through sober conduct and systematically decent morals, rather than through the performance of mystic church rituals. The ascetic in the cave was gone. In his place was the man of the world.
That world, of business and social mobility, had need of the new values. The humanist view found ready acceptance in schools. Some of the great teachers had sat with Chrysoloras; others were ready to follow. In 1404 Vergerio, one of Chrysoloras’ pupils, wrote a treatise on education at the university of Padua. In it he upturned medieval ideas for good. It was less important, he said, to impart knowledge than to foster character in the pupil. The typical pupil he had in mind, of course, was the merchant’s son who needed to please his father’s colleagues by showing ambition and a competitive attitude and paying strict attention to business matters. Vergerio had learned the Byzantine love of detail, which so aptly fitted the business world. ‘Always take notes,’ he advised.
Two other men led the way. Both were teachers and both went to the new humanist courts: one to that of the Gonzaga family in Mantua, the other to the Este court in Ferrara. Vittorino da Feltre and Guarino da Verona taught the children both of their noble masters and of the poor. They prepared their charges not for the Church but for public life, teaching grammar, poetry, rhetoric, history and moral philosophy from classical texts. As Vittorino said, ‘Not everybody is called to be a lawyer, a physician, a philosopher… but all of us are created for the life of social duty, all of us are responsible for the personal influence which goes out from us.rsquo;
The new attitude was reflected in the curriculum. The old subjects of formal rhetoric and public speaking were replaced first by prose composition, then letter writing, then business administration through the ars dictaminis, where the pupil learned to dictate a closely reasoned report or letter to his scribe.
The secular wave brought to the fore an interest in history. Another of the new bourgeois yearnings was to have illustrious forebears. For the first time European society became aware of a documented past. Reading the classical authors revealed a sophisticated civilisation that had existed before the ‘medieval darkness’ described by Petrarch. The legend arose that Florence had been founded by the troops of Julius Caesar, rather than, as the old story went, by Charlemagne, semi-magical progenitor of most of medieval Europe!
However advanced this humanist outlook may seem, it must be remembered that there were still few tools with which to give concrete expression to the new-found confidence of Florence. Nature was still seen as mysterious and symbolic, whether the Romans and Greeks had thought so or not. Then, some time in the first or second decade of the fifteenth century, everything was to change, thanks to a young man returning from his studies at Padua University. His name was Paolo del Pozzo Toscanelli, member of a well-known and successful family of spice traders in Florence, and he had gone to Padua to get a medical education.
Padua was the place to which most of the supporters of Averroes had fled in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, so as to continue teaching his philosophy of the empirical investigation of a universe which was seen as a machine-like creation obeying rational laws. The city had maintained its independent intellectual tradition principally because it had been taken by Venice in 1404. Venice