THE RENAISSANCE

Introduction:
The term "renaissance" is used by historians to describe the period of European history covering the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. The word itself etymologically is French for "rebirth" meaning in general a revival of culture. Most historians today tend to use it to refer to an age of gradual transition rather than one of sharp departure from the medieval past. The term was first used by nineteenth century historians to apply to the broad cultural change which came over western Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The term is used to describe the reviving of the values of classical Greek and Roman civilizations in the arts, politics, and thinking which originated in Italy and spread over most of Western Europe.

The Reaissance began with the revival of classical learning by scholars who have come to be called "humanists." The term "humanist" was originally used to refer to someone who taught Latin grammar, then one who had an intense interest in the subject of the humanities, with an emphasis on classical books coming down from ancient Greece and Rome, and on the classical langueages (Greek and Latin) in which those books were writtem. But the term came later to mean not only a student of Latin and Greek classical writings, but one who moulded his life on what he read. The focus of this classical revival was more on man and his relation to the physical world than on God and the world to come, as had been true in the medieval past. Thus the term "humanist" stands in contrast to the "schoolman" and "humanism" in contrast with "scholasticism".

The humanist movement originated in Italy in the fourteenth century and later spread to other European countries when it reached it climax in the sixteenth century. The humanists occupied the chairs of the humanities at the universities, dominated in the secondary schools which they thoroughly reorganized, and held an important place in chanceries, courts and other educated circles of the time. Their literary production includes translation of classical writings, commentaries, orations, letters, poems and historical writings as well as philosophical treaties, and many of the latter are popular and amateurish in character. Nevertheless, the Renaissance humanism exercised a deep influence on the history of philosophical thought, and some of its representatives achieve philosophical significance. To the philosophical literature of the Renaissance, the humanists contributed not merely higher standards of clarity and literary elegance, and the methods of philological and historical criticism, but also the forms of the epistle, of the dialogue and of the essay.

Although the Renaissance humanists read non-Christian writers, such as Plato and Cicero, they were not necessarily opposed to Christianity. In fact most of the early humanists professed faith in Christ. Only later, in the heyday of the classical revival, did many of the Renaissance thinkers reject or ignore Christianity to admire pagan virtues and to practice pagen vices. For example, anyone who read The Prince, written by Niccolo Machiavelli (1469?-1527) four years before Luthers protest in 1517 (1513), might be tempted to suppose that Christianity never existed. Thus the term "humanism" has come to mean that philosophy that exalts man at the expense of God. It has become a religion which worships man and man's false ideas.

The Italian Renaissance:
The Renaissance began in Italy and the first known humanists was Lovato Lovati (1241-1309). He was a judge in Padua who introduced a new way of treating the Latin classics by attempting to imitate their spirit as well as their letter. Besides composing Latin verse and cultivating literary friendships, he discovered manuscripts of forgotten classics in the library of the Benedictine abbey of Pomposa, thus launching a search for the hidden treasures of antiquity, which became one of the hallmarks of humanism.

Humanism came of age in the Italian Francesco Petratca, or Petrarch (1304-1374). Brought up in Avignon, and in clerical orders, his real interest was in the revival of Latin literature, especially the writings of Cicero. He was a diligent student, and above all a man of letters, he was a friend of princes, and his writings have had enormous effect on European literature. Petrarch was a sensitive writer and a Christian by conviction (his favorite author was Augustine). But he despised Scholasticism and he condemned Aristotle. He reacted against the Aristotelian form in which Christianity was presented by the medieval schoolmen. He was not a speculative thinker, and he hated the logic-chopping of the schools, the sterility of medieval rhetoric and the "barbarism" of scholastic Latin.

Petrarch is important in the history of the church in that he polarized Christian opinion between the old scholasticism and the new humanism, between the authoritarian tradition and the cult of original texts. In the next two centuries, both the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation occurred in the context of this polarization. Petrarch has been called "the first modern man", but he shared with his contemporaries many of the medieval prejudices and limitations. The humanist emphasis on man was expressed by this earlist great representative of humanism and gave rise to several treatises on the dignity of man. But his Christian humanism agonized between Augustine and Cicero, yet the inheritance which he left for his successors was the ideal of a world of classical values recaptured and displayed within the context of a restored Christianity.

Petrarch's friend and admirer was Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375), a fellow humanist who wrote voluminously in Latin and Italian. He is chiefly remembered now for Decameron, but he was greatly influential in his own age in the premoting the study of Greek, in unlocking the mysteries of classical mythology, and in furthering humanistic studies in Florence and Naples.

The humanistic cultivation of Greek began in southern Italy when, in 1360, Boccaccio brought Lenotius Pilatus to Florence. About 1397, Greek was taught, under the auspices of the government of the same city, by Manuel Chrysoloras (1355?-1415), who translated Homer and Plato. The Council of Ferrara and Florence (1438-1439) greatly fostered the desire to master the treasures of the East by bringing the Greeks and Latins together. The Council of Ferrara, which was transferred to Florence in 1439, witnessed protracted discussion between the Greeks and Latins, in which the primacy of the Pope was accepted in vague terms. This seemed to preserve the rights of the Eastern patriarchs, the Greeks retained their peculiarities of worship and priestly marriage, while the disputed filoque clause of the creed was acknowledged by the Greeks, though with understanding that they would not add it to the ancient symbol. The archbishop of Ephesus, Mark, refused agreement, but the Emperor and most of his ecclesiastical following approved, and the reunion of the two churches was joyfully proclaimed in July, 1439. Bessarion (1395-1472), the gifted archbishop of Nicaea, who entered into negotiation for the union of the Greek and Latin Churches, thenceforth aided the work.

Petrarch's immediate heir was Coluccio Salutati (1331-1406). This Tuscan notary was for more than thirty years chancellor of the Florence City Council, and in that office he introduced classical eloquence in the city correspondence. He continued the quest to find hidden manuscripts and subject them to critical examination, and was himself the author of Latin works modelled on the classics of antiquity. Two of his eminent followers, Leonardo Bruni (1374-1444) and Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459), left Florence and found jobs in the papal chancery at Rome, which, after the election of Pope Maritn V in 1417, became the most important centre of humanism in Italy.

The Conciliar Movement was inextricably bound up with the history of the Renaissance and the expansion of humanism. While attending the Council of Constance as a papal secretary, Poggio Bracciolini found time to explore the surrounding German and Swiss monasteries for classical texts, and his searches were richly rewarded. At St. Gall and elsewhere he discovered invaluable works of Cicero, Lucretius, Quintilian, Statius, Vitruvisu and other Latin authors. These were most notable manuscript finds of the century.

One of the foremost aims of Italian humanists was to read classical Greek literature in the original. The knowledge of Greek had never entirely died out in the West, but before the fifteenth century it was confined to a mere handful of scholars in any one generation. Petrarch owned a text of Homer, but he could not read it. Boccaccio tried to learn the language but made little headway. It was Salutati who most effectively champoned the cause of Greek studies in Italy. Through his efforts, a professorship of Greek was created at Florence in 1396, and the post was filled the following year by Emanuel Chrysoloras (1350?-1415), a distinguished Brzantine scholar and diplomat brought over from Constantinople. A succession of learned Greeks occupied the position until 1480, when an Italian humanist, Angelo Poliziano (1454-1494), was appointed. By that time, Greek studies were firmly established in the West.

Greek is the language of the New Testament as well as of the classics. Inevitably the humanists extended their attention from text of profane literature to the texts of sacred literature. The pioneer in this field was Lorenzo Valla (1405-1457), a Roman who deserves to be called the father of modern biblical criticism. In 1444, he published a daring comparison between the Latin Vulgate translation of the Greek original of the New Testament in his Annotations on the New Testament.

Valla developed historical criticism when he exposed the falsity of the Donation of Constantine about 1440, and denied the composition of the Apostle's Creed to the Apostles. He criticised the rightfulness of monastic vows, and laid the foundation of New Testament studies in 1444 by a comparison of the Vulgate with the Greek.

For Valla, everything was subjected to the same scholarly investigation. Jerome's Vulgate Bible was a text to be examined on the same principles of criticism as the Annals of Tacitus. Four years earlier, Valla had proved from historical and linguistic evidence that the Donation of Constantine was a forgery. In another work, he mocked the methods of scholasticism. By meticulous scholarship and comparison of text with text, he undermined the medieval tradition that was based on authority. In many ways, he foreshadowed Erasmus. His writings deeply influenced the German Reformers of the next century, and were especially prized by Luther.

To the influence of Gemistos Plethon (1355-1450), another attendant of the reunion Council, was due the founding of the Platonic Academy, about 1442, by Cosimo de' Medici (1389-1464), the real ruler of Florence. There the study of Plato was pursued ardently later under the leadership of Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499). Ficino, who became a priest, combined an earnest Christianity with his platonic enthusiasm. He believed that a return to the Christian sources was the chief need of the time -- a conviction not shared by the majority of Italian humanists, but he was to be profoundly influencial beyond the Alps, as propagated by his admirers, Jacques Le Fevre in France and John Colet in England, and in turn transmitted it to Erasmus. Almost as influential was Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494), whose zeal for Hebrew and knowledge of the Kabala were to influence Reuchlin.

Ficino was captivated by the writings of Plato and the neo-Platonic philosopher Plotinus (A.D. 305?-270), which he translated in 1492, and wrote a commentary on Plato (the Theologia platonica de immortalitate animorum). Ficino fell into the same error that Augustine did; he saw no conflict between neo-Platonism and Christianity as the "only true religion". Ficino put the ancient pagan philosophy on the same level with the Scriptures. He once went so far as to propose that passages from Plato's writings be read along with Scripture in the liturgy (order of service) of the church.

Ficino saw his philosophical investigations as a necessary complement to religious preaching, which was powerless to destroy the impiety of Averoes. What was needed was "a philosophical religion which philosophers will gladly hear and which, perhaps, will persuade them. With a few changes, Platonists would be Christians." [1] Ficino found in Plato God the Creator as well as souls endowed with a personal existence, freedom, and immortality. He was not an original thinker, but he was a skilled translator and commentator, whose books (published in Paris during the sixteenth century) remained the source of information concerning Plato and Plotinus throughout the Renaissance.

Renaissance Italy produced in the art of Michelangelo (1475-1564) and in the writings of Machiavelli (1469-1527), especially in his The Prince (1513), a new extreme humanism. This humanism made men into gods, and in this extreme humanism of the Italian Renaissance humanity began to take on the power and majesty of the one true God. In the vain imagination of some men, the truth that man was created by God was changed into the lie that man is God.

The Renaissance artists and philosophers tended to be individualistic in their outlook. Benvenuto Cellini (d. 1571), who has left an interesting account of his life in autobiography, was intensely individualistic in his enjoyment of life and gave primary consideration to his own desires. This attitude on the part of the Renaissance artists and scholars led to a secularizaton of society. Something of this amoral secularization became apparent in Machiavelli's book The Prince. He advised the ruler of a state to subordinate absolute standards of conduct to expediency. If a lie or deceit would strengthen his position or his state, then he should not hesitate to use it.

But there was also another kind of humanism in the Italian Renaissance. Before the Renaissance culminated in such an extreme humanism, the Renaissance produced another kind of humanism that can be very beneficial and worthwhile. The Renaissance centered on subject matters such as history, grammar, rhetoric (the art of speaking), poetry, and philosophy. Such subjects are called humanities, because so much of them involves the study of man. The humanities forcus on man -- the pleasures and pains of being human, the problems and solutions of human living.

But during the Middle Ages, the humanities had been neglected. The officially recognized scholastic scholars and teachers had assumed that the Roman Church had all the answers to man's questions about himself. But the Renaissance Italians knew better. As humanists, they wanted to pick up where the writers of Greece and Rome had left off on such subjects, and emphasized the need to return to a study of the classical works of literature, art, science, mathematics, and other fields. At first the word humanism meant only an intense interest in the subjects of the humanities, with an emphasis on the classical books coming down from ancient Greece and Rome, and, on the classical languages (Greek and Latin) in which those books were origianally written. A humanist was a person with an avid interest in the humanities. We must be careful to distinguish this kind of humanism, which we could call classical studies, from the humanism that has been in existence in one form or another since the beginning of the human race. This wrong kind of humanism is the humanism that exalts man in the place of God. It is a religion which worships man and man's false ideas.

The Renaissance produced many famous artists. In the arts, Michaelangelo decorated the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel with magnificent paintings. He also became the able architect who supervised the completion of Saint Peter's in Rome and crowned the building with its lovely dome. He also designed the colorful uniform still used by the Swiss guard. Lenonardo de Vinci (d. 1519) painted the beautiful Last Supper and the Mona Lisa and drew sketches of machine guns and submarines that are remarkable in the similarity to modern machines.

The men of the Renaissance were lovers of beauty in nature and in man. In fact, they made a cult of beauty. Paintings of the era indicate increasing interest in the careful study of human anatomy so that pictures would be accurate. This love of beauty is to be seen in the skillful presentation of colorful rich fabrics in the pictures drawn by Titian (1477-1576), the protrait painter of Vence. These pictures are in contrast to the emaciated, distorted figures and paintings of the Gothic era.

But Renaissance also produced a friar named Girolamo Savonarola (1452-1498) who dared to speak up against the corruption in Reanaissance Italy. As a young man, Savonarola was distrubed by the immorality he saw outside and inside the church in Renaissance Italy. During his early twenties he became a monk. In 1481, he went to live with the monks in the monastery in the city of Florence. Ten years later, Savonarola had become well known for his fiery preaching. He was convinced that God's final judgment was coming soon. Repent, he preached, before it is too late. He claimed new prophecies, new revelations beyond the Bible. When France invaded Italy and defeated Florence in battle in 1494, many people began to think highly of Savonarola as a prophet, for the events seemed to confirm his predictions. It was during this time of turmoil that the Medici family, who had been controlling the government of the city, temporarily fell from power in Florence and were, in fact, expelled from the city. But Savonarola's prestige grew and grew. The popular friar was soon the most important person in the government of Florence.

As Savonarola combined political power with his preaching, the message stayed the same: repent. But Savonarola never disagreed with any Roman Catholic basic beliefs. In fact, he was really trying to make all the citizens of Florence to live like monks and "earn" their salvation. And when Savonarola turned his preaching against the church, it was the immorality of the pope -- at the time the nortorious Alexander VI -- that disturbed him. He was not bothered by what the pope and the church taught about salvation.

With his attack against the pope, Savonarola plunged very deeply into the jungle of politics and religion in Renaissance Italy. The pope excommunicated the friar and threatened Florence. Then Florence began to turn against the friar. And sin was as rampant as ever. Men hostile to Savonarola took control of the government. And after a trial, Savonarola was hanged and his body burned on May 23, 1498.

Savonarola's fate made a deep impression on his fellow Forentine, Machiavelli. It probably convinced him that it was hopeless to try to change the Roman Catholic Church. Machiaveli had Savonarola in mind when he wrote in The Prince: "...all armed prophets have conquered and unarmed ones failed...." Machiavelli may have received the mistaken idea of true Christianity from Savonarola's preaching and actions.

Savonarola is sometimes regarded as a forerunner of the Protestant Reformation. And to some extent he was, and the Reformation leader Martin Luther did indeed look back in admiration to Savonarola. The Italian martyr is rightly praised for his recognition of the immorality so rampant in the Roman church and for his boldness in calling for reform.

But Savonarola never seems to have grasped the there was more than a moral problem in that church. He never faced the doctrinal problem -- all the errors was about salvation. Savonarola, as the historian Philip Schaff notes, "was a true Catholic. He did not deny a single dogma of the medieval church." But Savonarola did say, "I take the Scripture as my sole guide." His fiery preaching did indeed show much Bible study, and the historian Thomas Armitage reports that Savonarola was "so versed in the Scripture that he could almost repeat them from memory." But in claiming new revelation beyond the Bible, he acted much like the church he critized, which placed its own pronouncement on a level with Scripture. And rather than trying to separate church and state, Savonarola entangled politics and religion just as much as the pope did.

By the middle of the fifteenth century, the Renaissance movement was dominating the educated class in Italy. In general, its attitude toward the church was one of indifference. It revived widely a pagan point of view, and sought to reproduce the life of antiquity with its vices as well as its virtues. Few periods of the world's history have been so boastfully corrupt as that of the Renaissance.

The Renaissance movement was given wings by the great invention of Johannes Gutenberg (1400-1468) of Mainz in Germany, about 1445 -- that of the printing with movable type. The first complete book known to have been printed in the Christian world was the Bible (1456). The art spread rapidily, and not only made available to the many books which had herebefore been only the property of the few, but, from the multiplication of copies, rendered the results of learning practically indestructible. By the time that Luther was born, printing was well established throughout Europe. More than thirty thousand publications were issued before 1500.

The greatest thinker of the fifteenth century, Nicholas of Cusa (Nicolaus Cusanus) (1401-1464), who died a cardinal and bishop of Brixen, defies classification, but he may be considered a Platonist. He received some impulses from Italian humanism, but he was more deeply indebted to the traditions of German and Dutch mysticism. His thought can hardly be considered humanist, but in writings he expressed a way of thinking which transcended that of Scholasticism. He stood in the tradition of Neo-Platonic mysticism without emanations, and he developed a highly original cosmology and philosophical theology. He conceived of God or the absolute maximum as the infinite in which all opposites coincide and which hence cannot be known through ordinary processes of reasoning that apply only to the finite, but must be approached through an indirect and negative method which Nicholas calls "learned ignorance" (this is also the title of his major work, 1440). The universe which is created by God consists of particulars each of which is a different manifestation or "contraction" of the one infinite that is their common model or "Idea." That is, the general conclusion is that every part of the universe is present in every other part; and man, in particular, is both image of God and a microcosm in which it reflected the total macrocosm.

Nicholas Kryfts or Krebs was born at Cusa on the Mosella in Germany. Educated as a boy by the Brothers of the Common Life at Deventer, he subsequently studied at Heidelberg (1416) and Padua (1417-1423) and received the doctorate in Canon Law. Ordained priest in 1426, he took up a post at Coblenz; but in 1432 he was sent to the Council of Basle on the business of the Count von Mandersheid, who wanted to become bishop of Trier. Becoming incolved in the deliberations of the Council, Nicholas showed himself a moderate adherent of the conciliar party. Later, he changed his attitude to the position of of the papacy and he became a papal emissary, charged most often with missions pointing toward ecclesiastical reform. He was sent to Byzantium in connection with the negotiations for the reunion of the Eastern Church with Rome, which was accomplished (temporarily) at the Council of Florence. He was named a carnial in 1448 and he was appointed to the bishopric of Brixen in 1450. From 1451 to 1452, he acted as Papal Legate in Germany. He died during August of 1464 at Todi in Umbria.

In spite of his ecclesiastical activities, Nicholas wrote a considerable number of works. His principal writtings are: On Catholic Harmony (1433-1434); On Learned Ignorance (1440); On the Hidden God (1444); Apology for Learned Ignorance (1449); The Idiot (1450); The Vision of God (1453); On the Peace of Faith (1453); as well as many mathematical treatises. His works are a strange blend of Ockhamism, transmitted to him by his teachers in Heidelberg, and of Neo-Platonism, thoroughly assimilatd through the reading not only of Dioysius the Areopagite but especially the great works of Proclus: the Elements of Theology, the Commentary on Parmenides, and Platonic Theology. In spite of his extremely imperfect knowledge of Greek language, his direct and sustained contact with the roots of Platonism was of capital importance.

The Neo-Platonism of the Arabs and even of Dionysius the Areopagite were totally different; totally different also was the Neo-Platonism of Plotinus and of Proclus. The first was concerned mainly with describing the hierarchy of beings, from angels or intelligencies to the lower spirits, in order to determine in some way the metaphysical position of each being. The second, much closer to Plato, notwithstanding the differences, sought to show how each degree in the scale of the hierarchy of living beings contains the fulness of reality but reveals it from a different angle: the One contains all things, as do Intelligence, Soul, and the sensible world, but each hypostasis contains it in its own way. In the One, all things are indistinct; in Intelligence, they interpenetrate, thanks to an intuitive vision that sees all things in each thing; in Soul, they are no longer bound by anything but the bounds of discursive reason; in the world, they remain external to each other, with the result that their difference can be expressed in terms of knowledge rather than in terms of being. The Neo-Platonist conceived the passage from one hypostasis to the next highest, less as the passage from one reality to the next than as the ever deepening, ever unifying vision of one and same universe.

This Neo-Platonic idea, expressed in myriad ways in On Learned Ignorance (1440) and in the other works of the cardinal, was the very heart of his thought. Nicholas was searching for a method that would allow him to reach a higher plane for viewing the universe than that of reason or the senses: to see all things intellectualiter rather than rationaliter was his aim.

Though the fifteenth century was a notable period of university foundation in Germany -- not less than twelve universities came into existence between 1409 and 1506 -- these new creations did not owe their existnce to the Renaissance. They grew partly out of a strong desire for learning, but even more from the ambition of the larger territorial rulers to possess such schools in their own lands. An influence favorable to the ultimate triumph of humanism was the revival of the older "realistic" mediaeval theology, and a tendency to go back of even the earlier schoolmen to Augustine, and to Neo-Platonic rather then Aristotelian conceptions. These revivals were strongly represented in the University of Paris by the last quarter of the fifteenth century, and spread from thence to Gemman universities with considerable following. They made for many the bridge to humanism, and they rendered possible that dominance of Augustinian conceptions which was to be characteristic of the Reformation age.

The European Renaissance:
The Italian Renaissance spread throughout Europe especially to northern Europe, north of the Alps, in the late fifteenth and the early sixteenth centuries. Outside of Italy, humanism is represented by such great figures as John Colet (1466?-1519) and Sir Thomas More (1480-1535) in England, Johannes Reuchlin (1455-1522) in Germany, Desiderius Erasmus (1467-1536) of Rotterdam in the province of Holland, and Juan Luis Vives (1492-1540) in Spain. They are all characterized by strong religious and theological interests and by the tendency to formulate political ideals based on moral standards.

The most influential Spanish humanists was Jaun Luis Vives (1492-1540), who spent most of his creative life in Louvain, Bruges, and England. Like Erasmus and More, his friends, he applied the philosophy of the New Learning to the reform of society and education. In his On the Help of the Poor, published in 1526, he advocated a system of government social services which included such proposals as making extensive case studies, public support of the worthy poor, public rearing of foundlings, free medical service for the indigent, and provision of work for the unemployed poor. In his Causes of the Corruption of the Arts, he urged a complete, well-rounded education for young people, including girls. He is also notable for his attempt to substitute a complete encyclopedia of humanist learning for the traditional body of the medieval arts and sciences (De tradendis disciplinis).

The majority of northern humanists were more interested in the Christian classics (that is, the New Testament and the Fathers) than in pagan texts. They also were concerned with reforming the church according to apostolic principles. Because of their desire to apply humanism to the questions of reform, these northern scholars generally are called "Christian humanists".

Ulrich von Hutton (1488-1523) brought the discerning spirit of Valla into Germany. Returning from a visit to Italy, von Hutton edited in 1517 a German edition of Valla's refutation of the Donation of Constantine. Von Hutton daringly dedicated it to the pope. He used the occasion to attack the papacy as it had never been attacked before in Germany. He continued the attack against the Roman Church in the Epistles of the Unfamed Man. Von Hutton's work caused many Germans to laugh at and ridicule the corrupt church, but this scholar was a very serious, determine individual, who would later take his stand with the leader Martin Luther during the Protestant Reformation.

Von Hutton also stood with John Reuchlin (1455-1522), writing a poem on the behalf of this scholar whose work was condemned by the pope. Reuchlin's crime was to have written a book friendly to the Jews. He had become a master of the Hebrew language, which he had learned from Jewish rabbis (the offical leaders of Jewish congregations). As he learned the language of the Old Testament, Reuchlin grew to love the people whose language he studied and who played such a central role in the Bible. Rather than calling for their persecution -- the typical attitude of that day toward the Jews -- Reuchlin said that efforts should be made to convert the Jews to Christianity. This pioneer of Hebrew learning also made important contributions to the study of Greek, and he was well versed in the classical books, from poetry to philosophy.

The new learning that von Hutton, Reuchlin, and others promoted clashed with offically approved scholasticism in the German universities. But as the Modern Age began, the new learning was gaining ground in those educational institutions. With the Renaissance, this rebirth in Bible study in the original languages in the German universities, the Light was bound to break through. It was in this atmosphere of Christian scholarship that the men who would lead the Prostestant Reformation in Germany lived and breathed.

Philip Melanchthon (1497-1560), who would be at Martin Luther's side in the forefront of the Prostestant Reformation in a few years, became professor of Greek at Wittenberg University in 1518. He was recommended for the job by Reuchlin, his great-uncle. Melanchthon mastered Latin and Greek, and was throughly educated in the classical books of philosophy, studied the works of William Ockham, and read the Book of Books for himself. Four days after arriving in Wittenberg, Melanchthon delivered an address to the University entitled "The Improvement of Studies," calling for a study of the classical books and the Bible.

Martin Luther (1483-1546), the leader of the Protestant Reformation, was very much part of the German Renaissance. He was a teacher and scholar, widely read in the classical Latin books, thoroughly trained in philosophy and theology as taught in the schools during the Middle Ages (including the works of Ockham), very familiar with the books written by the scholars of the Italian Renaissance, and above all profoundly learned in the Bible.

The Renaissance learning reached France in the early 1500's. Here too, as in Germany, it was Bible-centered. The classical books of ancient Greece and Rome were avidly studied, but not to the neglect of the Bible. The Renaissance Frenchman who had the greatest influence on world history was John Calvin (1509-1564).

In the island country of England, off the western coast of the European continent, Bible-centered scholarship came alive in the person of John Colet (1467-1519). Widely traveled, widely read, devoted to the classical books, a humanist in the good sense of the term, Colet avidly studied the Scripture. He took a fresh approach to the Bible. He wanted to get back to the real, simple meaning of the text of the Bible. Thus he charged Thomas Aquinas, official philosopher of the Roman Church, with "corrupting the whole teaching of Christ with his profane philosophy."

At Oxford University, Colet lectured on Paul's epistles. After being appointed dean of St. Paul's Cathedral, Colet began preaching out against the sins of the Roman clergy. The Lollards, having survived the persecution of the Middle Ages, came to hear Colet; it is believed the Colet had read Wycliffe's writings. William Tyndale (1492?-1536), who would produce one of the most important English translation of the Bible, and who would die a martyr's death for what he did, also heard Colet at Oxford. The clergy, said Colet, should "be properly learned in the Scripture, and ... be filled with the fear of God and the love of the heavenly life." In 1505, he founded St. Paul's School - the first Latin school in England to teach Greek - in the hepes that England might have a generation of learned Christians, taught by godly teachers who would be "upright and honorable and of much and well-attested learning."

The religious and political powers in England did not like Colet's preaching. According to a record coming down from the era, "in those days Doctor Colet was in trouble and would have been burned, if God had not turned the king's heart to the contrary."

Among the many other scholars of the English Renaissance, Thomas More (1478-1535) especially stands out. He is best remembered for his book Utopia (1516) which depicts an imaginary, ideal society. More had many questions about many Roman doctrines, including the power of the pope, but he never broke with the Roman Church. When serving as chancellor of England, in fact, he carried out the government's policy of persecuting people who were protesting that church. More himself eventually died as a martyr for the Roman Church.

The most famous figure by far of the Northern Renaissance was Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536), who was born in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, about 1466. Before he died in 1536, Erasmus had lived and studied all over Europe -- in Germany, France, England, Italy, and Switzerland. He had come to know (either in person or through letters) nearly every major scholar in Europe. They learned from him, he from them, and the admiration was mutual. He was the scholar of scholars.

Bible study had convinced Erasmus that the Roman Church had distorted Christianity. He hoped that if enough people saw that, things would change. To that end he wrote many books critical of the church (Adagio, Praise of Folly, Christian Soldier's Manual). In order that people might get back closer to original Christianity, before all the distortions, Erasmus also edited for printing new editions of writings of early church fathers. And as he looked back over church history, Erasmus could see how the distortions of the faith by politics, force, and violence, with confusion of church and state, was connected with neglect of the Bible.

In the summer of 1504, while rummaging through a monastery library in Louvain, Belgium, Erasmus found a copy of Valla's Notes on the New Testament. He had long admired Valla, whom he considered "unrivalied both in sharpness of his intelligence and the tenacity of his memory." But Erasmus had never seen this particular work before, and it opened his eyes to how much the Vulgate had distorted the New Testament from the Original Greek.

In 1505, Erasmus had Valle's notes published in the first printed edition. Ten work-filled years later, the scholar of scholars Erasmus had, as he said, "corrected the whole of the New Testament from collations [comparisons] of the Greek and ancient manuscripts...." In March 1516, the first printed edition of the New Testament in the original Greek came off the press. It was not Erasmus' intention that everyone should read the New Testament in Greek (though the more who did, the happier he would have been). "Only a few can be scholars," said Erasmus, "but there is no one who cannot be a Christian." It was Erasmus' hope that other scholars, using his Greek text, would translate the Scriptures into the present day languages that the people could read. Erasmus' faith was not in scholarship -- it was in the Bible. By the time Erasmus died in 1536, scholars had translated the Bible into many different languages. The printing press was making Bibles available to more and more people.

The Northern Renaissance, with Erasmus at the forefront, lead straight to the Protestant Reformation. As the Modern Age began, the Roman Church had not changed its mind about the Bible. The command of the Council of Toulouse in 1229, forbiding the Bible in any language to the ordinary people, was still in effect. The last martyr for the truth of the Bible had not died. But in the new era that was dawning, more people than ever were going to hear the truth that can make men free.

Conclusion:
Although the problem of the exact relationship between the Renaissance and and the Reformation is still unsolved, it is clear that the former movement affected the course of Christian history in several important ways.
First, Renaissance attitudes, values, and practices penetrated the Roman hierarchy in this period. By the time when Martin Luther (1483-1546) drafted his Ninety-Five Theses in 1517, the papal chair had a long history of occupants insensitive to the spiritual needs of the faithful and more concerned with polities than piety.
Second, the sharp criticism by Christian humanists of clerical abuse, and their call for reform, added to the growing unrest in Western Christendom. The old complaint of the monks that "Erasmus laid the egg that Luther hatched" contains a great deal of truth.
Third, after 1517 many younger humanists turned Protestant, among whom were Ulrich Zwingli (1484-1531), Philip Melanchthon (1497-1560), John Calvin (1509-1564), and Theodore Beza (1519-1605).

To all these religious-minded humanists, the path of reform seemed similar. Sound learning, the study and preaching of the Bible and the Fathers, and the correction of ignorance, immorality, and glaring administrative abuses would make the church what it should be. This solution did not meet the deep need of the situation; but the humanists rendered an indispentable preparation for the Reformation. They led men to study Christian sources afresh. They discredited the later scholastic theology. They brought in new and more natural methods of exegesis. To a large degree they looked on from another standpoint than the mediaeval. They represented a release of the mind, in some considerable measure, from mediaeval traditionalism.

Partly as a result of the Renaissance emphasis on the sources, but even more in consequence of the invention of printing, the latter half of the fifteenth century witnessed a wide distribution of the Bible in the Vulgate and in translation. No less than ninety-two editions of the Latin Vulgate were put forth before 1500. Eighteen editions of a German version were printed before 1521. The New Testament was printed in French in 1477; the whole Bible ten years later. In 1478, there was the publication of a Spanish translation; in 1471, there was printed two independent versions in Italian. In Netherlands. one of the best of all translations was printed in 1477 and the Psalms were seven times published between 1480 and 1507. The Scriptures were printed in Bohemian in 1488. Even though England had no printed Bible before the Reformation, many manuscripts of Wyclif's translation were in circulation.

Efforts were made to restrict the reading of the Bible by the laity, since its use seemed to be the source of mediaeval heresies. But the real source of the heresies was not the circulation and reading of the Bible but the interpretation of the Bible. The Middle Ages never denied the final authority of the Bible. Augustine and Aquinas so regarded it as the final authority. The real problem was: should the interpretation of the Bible be restricted to the teachers and councils of the church and the right of private interpretation be denied? The voices from Bohemia and the mediaeval sects denied that interpreting authority of church. But it was not the denial of the interpreting authority of the chruch that brought the Reformation. And it was not the distribution of Bible alone that brought the Reformation but a new interpretation of salvation and the church. The Bible is not so much the cause of Protestantism as was Protestantism as a new interpretation of Scriptures.

ENDNOTES

[1] Marsilio Ficino, Theologia platonica proaemium, p. iv.
quoted by H. Busson, Les Sources et le developpement du rationalisme p. 174.