1. Terminology
Speaking of the changing mood of the Later Middle Ages, one must mention two movements, both typical of this period and determining it, humanism and the Renaissance. It is difficult to delineate the period of humanism and Renaissance with sufficient precision. Yet, if we speak of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, we remain on the safe side. The cradle was doubtless Italy, but we find manifestations of both throughout the whole of Europe, with the exception of the Balkans, which were overrun by the Turks.
It should be stated that `humanism' is a neologism; this term was not used by the `humanists' of the centuries around 1500. The term was coined in 1808 by the German author J. Niethammer.[i] This scholar, a paedagogue, was not necessarily thinking of the fifteenth century, but rather of the, according to him, much needed reform of German education. It was only in 1841 that the term `humanism' was used for a specific intellectual movement of the Later Middle Ages; it was canonized as such by G. Voigt in 1859.[ii] Yet, although late medieval people knew that something new was emerging, they did not speak of `humanism', but of studia humanitatis or of humaniora. Its students were called humanista, in the analogy of iurista or canonista.
2. Criticism of the Church
What all these terms have in common is the word `human'. Humanist scholarship no longer concentrated on theology, but on `man, mankind, humanity'. This was a highly significant shift in these scholars' perception of what was intellectually important. It must, however, be stressed that the humanists did not bid farewell to the Roman Catholic Church and its dogmas; these were not yet at stake. But certain aspects of ecclesiastical life were severely criticized, even derided, for instance, by that first-rate humanist Desiderius Erasmus (1467-1536), who was a priest, even a monk, a Regular Canon of Saint Augustine, and who always remained true to the Church. Monks came under very heavy fire: they were considered obscurantists. Adoration of saints came very close to superstition, the critics found, not always without reason; pilgrimages were occasions for frivolity and libertinage. What the humanists wanted was a purified Church; many of their desiderata would be realized by the Reformation.
3. The `middle period'
It was not only in this respect that the humanists took their distance from the popular culture of the Middle Ages. This culture was a thing of the past to them. Medieval people did not know that they were living in the `Middle Ages'; they were told so for the first time in 1464, with the appearence of the term media aetas. Already a century earlier Petrarca (1304-1374) had suggested that the people of his time were living between two periods. The older indication media aetas was changed into medium aevum by Christoph Cellarius in his Historia universalis (1676-1688). Gradually the new division of history into three main periods replaced the older one into six periods. Medium aevum became `Middle Ages' in English, Moyen Age in French, Mittelalter in German, Medioevo in Italian, Middeleeuwen in Dutch.
What all these terms have in common is the word `middle', which signifies that the Middle Ages were an intermediate period, between glorious Antiquity and the equally glorious new times of humanism, Renaissance, and the Reformation. 'Middle Ages' and `medieval' became terms of contempt; they had been, according to the humanists, a period of obscurantism, dogmatism, superstition, and illiteracy. They had no good word for Scholasticism, the epitome of all that which they aborred in the Middle Ages. These ideas caught on. Until this day `medieval' has remained a term of opprobrium. `We no longer live in the Middle Ages', and how oft do we still hear of the `Dark Middle Ages', terms used by would-be progressives, who do not have the slightest notion of what life in the Middle Ages was like. These notions highlight the fact that humanism was an elitist movement.
4. Humanism as a literary phenomenon
The humanism of the period under consideration was mainly a literary phenomenon. In order to find inspiration its adherents skipped a thousand years. The great Greek and Latin authors of Antiquity became their venerated examples, never to be surpassed, hardly ever to be equalled. The study of Greek was given a strong impulse, when, after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, Byzantine scholars fled to Italy, bringing their manuscripts with them. Soon the invention of printing brought the new learning within the reach of countless people, especially the bourgeoisie who were avid for non-clerical erudition.
In 1454 Johann Gutenberg produced the first important printed book, a Bible. In 1500 twenty-seven thousand printed books had already appeared. Although the invention of the art of printing put books in the hands of everyone who could read, it also stressed the elitist character of the new learning. First of all, people who could neither write nor read were still legio, especially in the countryside. Next, then and now, many people who can read are never seen holding a book in their hands.
It should also be noted that the vast majority of printed books were in Latin; it is a far cry from stating that everybody in the Late Middle Ages could read Latin. However, the humanists, wanting a large readership, provided many translations in the vernacular languages. Yet, the humanist ideal was not the man who published in his vernacular; it was the homo trilinguis, the scholar who was equally versed in Latin, Greek and Hebrew. Nevertheless, the study of Hebrew lagged somewhat behind that of the classical languages. Some scholars, such as Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494) and Johannes Reuchlin (1455-1523) were interested in Hebrew literature; they studied the Talmud and the Kabbala. This meant that kabbalistic notions, which were Gnostic-dualistic, filtered into western consciousness.
The humanists' predilection for literary studies strongly influenced the contents of the curricula. The older formal Bildung, consisting of dialectics, that is, of logic, and metaphysics, of philosophy in general, lost ground in favour of philology, literature and history. Medieval historical books had mainly been collections of exempla, useful and applicable in practical life, particularly for rulers and politicians. The new historiography no longer saw the past as a quarry from which to dig up such examples, but as an organic whole, which must be understood in its own right.
5. Textual criticism
The humanists had a very low opinion of the quality of medieval manuscripts, especially those containing classical and biblical texts. Endless copying by hand had led to many errors and mistakes; there had also been copyists, who freely paraphrased and even inserted their own texts, to say nothing of spurious texts. With missionary industry the humanists devoted themselves to the task of purifying the classical texts and restoring them to their original shape; they diligently studied the oldest manuscripts. They also applied their scalpels to the manuscript texts of the Old and New Testaments, always going back to the oldest handwritten documents in the original languages.
In view of the religious developments of the sixteenth century, the Bible became of paramount importance, for it was the platform on which the great battle of the sixteenth century would be fought. In 1488 the first complete Hebrew Bible appeared; the aforementioned Gutenberg Bible was the first printed complete text of the Vulgata. In 1500 there had already been ninety-four editions of the complete Vulgata; our well-known subdivision into `chapter and verse' dates from 1481. The Greek New Testament was edited by Erasmus in 1516 and published by Elsevier in Leiden.
That the faithful could not read the Bible in their vernacular before the Reformation is a legend. In 1466 a printer in Strasbourg published a German translation, followed by fourteen reprints; in 1477 Wyclif's English translation saw the light of day.
6. Humanism and the Devotio moderna
It is no accident that many humanists sympathized with the Devotio moderna. This movement offered a new and contemporary form of religious experience. Although it was neither antithetical to medieval forms of religion nor anticlerical or opposed to the established Church, it was decidedly not medieval or clerical, and this appealed to the humanists. The Modern Devotion can be characterized as one of the late medieval reform movements.[iii]
Its founder was Geert Groote, born in Deventer (NL) in 1340, a commercial town on the river IJssel. As a son of a patrician and wealthy father he received an excellent education at the chapter school of his home town and later at the Sorbonne in Paris, mainly law. He was not a profligate, but there was much in his young life which he was not proud of later. In contrast to most preachers of penitence, he was an erudite, also something that charmed the humanists.
Around 1374 - he was then a cleric but not a priest and never did become one - he underwent a conversion, henceforth leading a very different sort of life. He became an ardent adherent of the poverty ideal, sold his house in Deventer and all his other worldly goods, and renounced the two prebends he had. He lived soberly, drank no wine and fasted often. Praying much, reading the Bible, meditating, hearing Mass and receiving the sacraments, being humble and remaining steadfastly devout in the vicissitudes of life, this was his programme of sanctity. It was an intimate form of religion, private and personal, not really social or communal. The humanists appreciated this form of devotion; they were no great lovers of massive demonstrations of religiosity, like pilgrimages.
From 1379 Geert Groote was active as an itinerant preacher of penitence. In his sermons he was neither dogmatic nor theological; he was practical, exhorting his hearers - he preached in churches but also in the open air - to lead a simple religious life. This too was in line with humanist ideas and also that he vehemently attacked the misbehaviour of the clergy. However, he remained on this side of anti-clericalism, which cannot be said of all humanists. There were more points of accordance; the modern devotees did not like certain forms of devotion, such as going on pilgrimage or the veneration of the saints, which they found to border on superstition. What they also had in common with the humanists was the return to the sources: their ideal Church was that of the first centuries, and also the heavy accent on Bible reading and on the Fathers of the Church.
The Devotio moderna was institutionalized in several religious foundations: the Brethern and Sisters of the Common Life and the Congregation of Windesheim; in this context it is not necessary to go any deeper into this. It is sufficient to state that Geert Groote was highly influential and that the Modern Devotion became widespread. It was not a humanistic phenomenon itself, but may be considered to be a parallel movement of humanism. I feel that its most important aspect was the private and personal form of religious experience. Although the Devotio moderna remained entirely within the confines of the established Church, this emphasis on privacy and inner enlightenment heralded things to come.
7. A new race of people
What kind of people were involved in humanism? Humanists were not only found in universities. There were merchants among them, notaries, civil and ecclesiastical officials, printers and booksellers, bankers and officers, and also statesmen and politicians. Although there were clerics in their ranks - Pope Pius II (1458-1464), Eneo Silvio di Piccolomini, was a famous humanist -, humanism was essentially a lay movement, also in this respect, that their outlook on life was typically unclerical, often even anti-clerical. Yet, as I wrote before, they were and remained true to the faith, albeit as critical believers.
A new race of people, predominantly of men, came into being, a new nobility, not of the sword, but of the mind; they were elitist and arrogant, contemptuously looking down on the vulgus. They were self-conscious, convinced of their worth and significance, fully alive to their importance as the heralds of a new age. If they had to be characterized by only one word, I would choose `autonomy'; they were no longer defined by their position as members of one of the medieval states or as members of the universal Church; they redefined their own position vis-à-vis Church and society. What they did not realize is that they were, in many respects, still medieval people; less still were they aware that their autonomy, their elitism, also made them very lonely.
8. Seeds of secularization
As remarked earlier, the humanists, whether Roman Catholic or Protestant, were not irreligious, let alone atheists; yet, by the same token, they were not the devoutest of believers. A case in point is the most famous of all humanists, Desiderius Erasmus. He was, like Luther, an Augustinian friar; he left his monastery in Stein near Gouda (NL), never to return to it, henceforth leading the life of an itinerant scholar. Although he was a priest, he never exercized a priestly function.
This demonstrates that humanism already contained the seeds of secularization in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It would prosper and become, with the secularization, the generally accepted vision of the world, of man, and of history. The humanism of the decades around 1500 was a reaction against the medieval world-view, which, because of its monastic and ecclesiastical colouring, laid a heavy accent on otherworldlyness, with heaven as the final goal of mankind and man. This leads to a depreciation of what is of the earth. It was also conservative: all that had to be stated about the conditio humana had already been stated, by Plato, by Moses, by Jesus Christ.
But then, to use the German terms, Jenseitigkeit made place for Diesseitigkeit. The emphasis was now placed on what is human, on the earth, on history. The humanists introduced the concept of change, of permanent change, so that the code word for history became `change'. The world became changeable. The process of transforming human reason into the definite and infallible criterion had begun.
9. Humanist dualism
I feel that there is no question that the stance of the humanists with regard to the Middle Ages was dualistic; their abhorrence of all that was medieval does not allow us to use another word. This is something from which the western mentality has still not yet fully recovered. Much of this we find in the Reformation. In many respects it was tributary to the Middle Ages, but at the same time put itself at an as great as possible distance from this period.
In so far as humanism and Renaissance meant a loss of religiosity, the Reformers tried to make people more authentically religious. But they shared the humanist abhorrence of medieval philosophy and theology. Actually the whole medieval Church, with its `popery', its monkdom, was rejected as not Christian, even as anti-Christian. The Reformers reached back over the Middle Ages to the early Church, especially to the Church of the apostles, which, in their opinion, had been pure and authentic, whereas the Church of the later centuries had become increasingly debased, not a truly apostolic Church. Here too we find a return to the ancient sources, in this case to the Bible. What, with regard to the organization of the Church in the broadest sense, is not found in the Gospels and in the Acts, had to be rejected and abolished.
In the long run humanism would become a (secularized) religion. As David Ehrenfeld wrote, "humanism is one of the vital religions ... It is the dominating religion of our time."[iv] Humanism believes in the omnipotence of human reason, which can solve all human problems, understand all that is of this earth, reorder human existence, and this time effectively, with universal human happiness as the final result. Not even the horrible catastrophes of the past century destroyed this optimism. The origin of this dualistic distancing from the Christian Churches and the Christian religion can already be found in the first humanism.
--------------
NOTES
LITERATURE
David Ehrenfeld, The Arrogance of Humanism. New York, 1978.
[i].The title of his book is Der Kampf des Philanthropismus and des Humanismus unserer Zeit.
[ii].He called his book Die Wiederbelebung des classischen Alterthumes oder das erste Jahrhundert des Humanismus.
[iii].See for this also Vol. XX, Part I, § 10c.
[iv].Ehrenfeld, Arrogance of Humanism 3.