History of the christian church
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In the 12th century, it seemed as if a new era in literature was impending, as if the old learning was about to flourish again. The works of Aristotle became more fully known through the translations of the Arabs. Schools were started in which classic authors were read. Abaelard turned to Virgil as a prophet. The Roman law was discovered and explained at Bologna and other seats of learning. John of Salisbury, Grosseteste, Peter of Blois and other writers freely quoted from Cicero, Livy, Tacitus, Suetonius, Ovid and other Latin authors. But the head of Western Christendom discerned in this movement a grave menace to theology and religion, and was quick to blight the new shoot with his curse, and in its early statutes, forced by the pope, the University of Paris excluded the literature of Rome from its curriculum. But this arbitrary violence could not forever hold the mind of Europe in bonds. The satisfaction its intelligence was seeking, it did not find in the subtle discussions of the Schoolmen or the dismal pictures of the monastics. When the new movement burst forth, it burst forth in Italy, that beautiful country, the heir of Roman traditions. The glories of Italy’s past in history and in literature blazed forth again as after a long eclipse, and the cult of the beautiful, for which the Italian is born, came once more into free exercise. In spite of invasion after invasion the land remained Italian. Lombards, Goths, Normans had occupied it, but the invaders were romanized much more than the Italians were teutonized. The feudal system and Gothic architecture found no congenial soil south of the Alps. In the new era, it seemed natural that the poets and orators of old Italy should speak again in the land which they had witnessed as the mistress of all nations. The literature and law of Greece and Rome again became the educators of the Latin and also of the Teutonic races, preparing them to receive the seeds of modern civilization. The tap-root of the Renaissance was individualism as opposed to sacerdotal authority. Its enfranchising process manifested itself in Roger Bacon, whose mind turned away from the rabbinical subtleties of the Schoolmen to the secrets of natural science and the discoveries of the earth reported by Rubruquis or suggested by his own reflection, and more fully in Dante, Marsiglius of Padua and Wyclif, who resisted the traditional authority of the papacy. It was active in the discussions of the Reformatory councils. And it received a strong impetus in the administration of the Lombard cities which gloried in their independence. With their authority the imperial policy of Frederick Barbarossa and Frederick II. had clashed. Partly owing to the loose hold of the empire and partly owing to the papal policy, which found its selfish interests subserved better by free contending states and republics than by a unified kingdom of Italy under a single temporal head, these independent municipalities took such deep root that they withstood for nearly a thousand years the unifying process which, in the case of France, Great Britain and Spain, resulted in the consolidation of strong kingdoms soon after the era of the Crusades closed. Upon an oligarchical or a democratic basis, despots and soldiers of fortune secured control of their Italian states by force of innate ability. Individualism pushed aside the claims of birth, and it so happened in the 14th and 15th centuries that the heads of these states were as frequently men of illegitimate birth as of legitimate descent. In our change-loving Italy, wrote Pius II., "where nothing is permanent and no old dynasty exists, servants easily rise to be kings." 987 It was in the free republic of Florence, where individualism found the widest sphere for self-assertion, that the Renaissance took earliest root and brought forth its finest products. That municipality, which had more of the modern spirit of change and progress than any other mediaeval organism, invited and found satisfaction in novel and brilliant works of power, whether they were in the domain of government or of letters or even of religion, as under the spell of Savonarola. There Dante and Lionardo da Vinci were born, and there Machiavelli exploited his theories of the state and Michelangelo wrought. The Medici gave favor to all forms of enterprise that might bring glory to the city. After Nicolas V. ascended the papal throne, Rome vied with its northern neighbor as a centre of the arts and culture. The new tastes and pursuits also found a home in Ferrara, Urbino, Naples, Milan and Mantua. Glorious the achievement of the Renaissance was, but it was the last movement of European significance in which Italy and the popes took the lead. Had the current of aesthetic and intellectual enthusiasm joined itself to a stream of religious regeneration, Italy might have kept in advance of other nations, but she produced no safe prophets. No Reformer arose to lead her away from dead religious forms to living springs of spiritual life, from ceremonies and relics to the New Testament. In spreading north to Germany, Holland and England, the movement took on a more serious aspect. There it produced no poets or artists of the first rank, but in Reuchlin and Erasmus it had scholars whose erudition not only attracted the attention of their own but benefited succeeding generations and contributed directly to the Reformation. South of the Alps, culture was the concern of a special class and took on the form of a diversion, though it is true all classes must have looked with admiration upon the works of art that were being produced. It was, then, the mission of the Renaissance to start the spirit of free inquiry, to certify to the mind its dignity, to expand the horizon to the faculties of man as a citizen of the world, to recover from the dust of ages the literary treasures and monuments of ancient Greece and Rome, to inaugurate a style of fresh description, based on observation, in opposition to the dialectic circumlocution of the scholastic philosophy, to call forth the laity and to direct attention to the value of natural morality and the natural relationships of man with man. To the monk beauty was a snare, woman a temptation, pleasure a sin, the world vanity of vanities. The Humanist taught that the present life is worth living. The Renaissance breathed a cosmopolitan spirit and fostered universal sympathies. In the spirit of some of the yearnings of the later Roman authors, Dante exclaimed again, "My home is the world."8
Dante Alighieri, 1265–1321, the first of Italian and the greatest of mediaeval poets, has given us in his Divina Commedia, the Divine Comedy, conceived in 1300, a poetic view of the moral universe under the aspect of eternity,—sub specie aeternitatis. Born in Florence, he read under his teacher Brunetto Latini, whom in later years he praised, Virgil, Horace, Ovid and other Latin authors. In the heated conflict of parties, going on in his native city, he at first took the side of the Guelfs as against the Ghibellines, who were in favor of the imperial régime in Italy. In 1300, he was elected one of the priori or chief magistrates, approved the severe measures then employed towards political opponents and, after a brief tenure of office, was exiled. The decree of exile threatened to burn him alive if he ventured to return to the city. After wandering about, going to Paris and perhaps further west, he settled down in Ravenna, where he died and where his ashes still lie. After his death, Florence accorded the highest honors to his memory. Her request for his body was refused by Ravenna, but she created a chair for the exposition of the Divine Comedy, with Boccaccio as its first occupant, and erected to her distinguished son an-imposing monument in the church of Santa Croce and a statue on the square in front. In 1865, all Italy joined Florence in celebrating the 6th centenary of the poet’s birth. Never has study been given to Dante’s great poem as a work of art by wider circles and with more enthusiasm than to-day, and it will continue to serve as a prophetic voice of divine judgment and mercy as long as religious feeling seeks expression. Dante was a layman, married and had seven children. An epoch in his life was his meeting, as a boy of nine years, with Beatrice, who was a few months younger than himself, at a festival given in her father’s house, where she was tenderly called, as Boccaccio says, Bice. The vision of Beatrice—for there is no record that they exchanged words—entered and filled Dante’s soul with an effluence of purity and benignity which cleared away all evil thoughts.9 After an interval of nine years he saw her a second time, and then not again till, in his poetic dream, he met her in paradise. Beatrice married and died at 24, 1290. With this vision, the new life began for Dante, the vita nuova which he describes in the book of that name. Beatrice’s features illuminated his path and her pure spirit was his guide. At the first meeting, so the poet says, "she appeared to me clothed in a most noble color, a modest and becoming crimson, garlanded and adorned in such wise as befitted her very youthful age." The love then begotten, says Charles Eliot Norton, "lasted from Dante’s boyhood to his death, keeping his heart fresh, spite of the scorchings of disappointment, with the springs of perpetual solace." 990 The last glimpse the poet gives of her was as he saw her at the side of Rachel in the highest region of heaven. The third in order, underneath her, lo! Rachel with Beatrice.—Par., xxxii. 6. Had Dante written only the tract against the temporal power of the papacy, the De monarchia, his name would have been restricted to a place in the list of the pamphleteers of the 14th century. His Divine Comedy exalts him to the eminence of the foremost poetic interpreter of the mediaeval world. This immortal poem is a mirror of mediaeval Christianity and civilization and, at the same time, a work of universal significance and perennial interest. It sums up the religious concepts of the Middle Ages and introduces the free critical spirit of the modern world. 991 It is Dante’s autobiography and reflects his own experiences: — All the pains by me depicted, woes and tortures, void of pity, On this earth I have encountered—found them all in Florence City. 992 It brings into view the society of mediaeval Italy, a long array of its personages, many of whom had only a local and transient interest. At the same time, the Comedy is the spiritual biography of man as man wherever he is found, in the three conditions of sin, repentance and salvation. It describes a pilgrimage to the world of spirits beyond this life, from the dark forest of temptation, through the depths of despair in hell, up the terraces of purification in purgatory, to the realms of bliss. Through the first two regions the poet’s guide is Virgil, the representative of natural reason, and through the heavenly spaces, Beatrice, the type of divine wisdom and love. The Inferno reflects sin and misery; the Purgatorio, penitence and hope; the Paradiso, holiness and happiness. The first repels by its horrors and laments; the second moves by its penitential tears and prayers; the third enraptures by its purity and peace. Purgatory is an intermediate state, constantly passing away, but heaven and hell will last forever. Hell is hopeless darkness and despair; heaven culminates in the beatific vision of the Holy Trinity, beyond which nothing higher can be conceived by man or angel. Here are depicted the extremes of terror and rapture, of darkness and light, of the judgment and the love of God. In paradise, the saints are represented as forming a spotless white rose, whose cup is a lake of light, surrounded by innocent children praising God. This sublime conception was probably suggested by the rose-windows of Gothic cathedrals, or by the fact that the Virgin Mary was called a rose by St. Bernard and other mediaeval divines and poets. Following the geocentric cosmology of the Ptolemaic system, the poet located hell within the earth, purgatory in the southern hemisphere, and heaven in the starry firmament. Hell is a yawning cavity, widest at the top and consisting of ten circles. Purgatory is a mountain up which souls ascend. The heavenly realm consists of nine circles, culminating in the empyrean where the pure divine essence dwells. Among these regions of the spiritual and future world, Dante distributes the best-known characters of his and of former generations. He spares neither Guelf nor Ghibelline, neither pope nor emperor, and gives to all their due. He adapts the punishment to the nature of the sin, the reward to the measure of virtue, and shows an amazing ingenuity and fertility of imagination in establishing the correspondence of outward condition to moral character. Thus the cowards and indifferentists in the vestibule of the Inferno are driven by a whirling flag and stung by wasps and flies. The licentious are hurried by tempestuous winds in total darkness, with carnal lust still burning, but never gratified.
Hurtles the spirits onward in its rapine, Whirling them round; and smiting, it molests them; It hither, thither, downward, upward, drives them. Inferno, V. 31–43. The gluttonous lie on the ground, exposed to showers of hail and foul water; blasphemers supine upon a plain of burning sand, while sparks of fire, like flakes of snow in the Alps, slowly and constantly descend upon their bodies. The wrathful are forever tearing one another. And I, who stood intent upon beholding, Saw people mud-besprent in that lagoon, All of them naked and with angry look. They smote each other not alone with hands, But with the head and with the breast and feet Tearing each other piecemeal with their teeth. Inferno, VII. 100 sqq. The simonists, who sell religion for money and turn the temple of God into a den of thieves, are thrust into holes, head downwards, with their feet protruding and tormented with flames. The arch-heretics are held in red-hot tombs, and tyrants in a stream of boiling blood, shot at by the centaurs whenever they attempt to rise. The traitors are immersed in a lake of ice with Satan, the arch-traitor and the embodiment of selfishness, malignity and turpitude. Their very tears turn to ice, symbol of utter hardness, and Satan is forever consuming in his three mouths the three arch-traitors, Judas, Brutus and Cassius. Milton represents Satan as the archangel who even in hell exalts himself and in pride exclaims, "Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven," and the poet leaves the mind of the reader disturbed by a feeling of admiration for Lucifer’s untamed ambition and superhuman power. Dante’s Satan awakens disgust and horror, and the inscription over the entrance to hell makes the reader shudder: — Through me ye enter the abode of woe; Through me to endless sorrow are brought; Through me amid the souls accurst ye go. * * * * * * * All hope abandon—ye who enter here!
* * * * * * * Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’ entrate. Passing out from the domain of gloom and dole, Virgil leads the poet to purgatory, where the dawn of day breaks. This realm, as has been said, comes nearer to our common life than hell or paradise.3 Hope dwells here. Song, not wailing, is heard. A ship appears, moved by an angel and filled with spirits, singing the hymn of redemption. Cato approaches and urges the guide and Dante to wash themselves on the shore from all remainders of hell and to hurry on. In purgatory, they pass through seven stages, which correspond to the seven mortal sins, the two lowest, pride and envy, the highest, wantonness and luxury. All the penitents have stamped on their foreheads seven P’s,—the first letter of the word peccata, sins,—which are effaced only one by one, as they pass from stage to stage, "enclasped with scorching fire," until they are delivered through penal fire from all stain. A similar correspondence exists between sin and punishments as in the Inferno, but with the opposite effect, for here sins are repented of and forgiven, and the woes are disciplinary until "the wound that healeth last is medicined." Thus the proud, in the first and lowest terrace, are compelled to totter under huge weights, that they may learn humility. The indolent, in the fourth terrace, are exercised by constant and rapid walking. The avaricious and prodigal, with hands and feet tied together, lie with their faces in the dust, weeping and wailing. The gluttons suffer hunger and thirst that they may be taught temperance. The licentious wander about in flames that their sensual passions may be consumed away. Arriving at paradise, the Roman poet can go no further, and Beatrice takes his place as Dante’s guide. The spirits are distributed in glory according to their different grades of perfection. Here are passed in review theologians, martyrs, crusaders, righteous princes and judges, monks and contemplative mystics. In the 9th heaven Beatrice leaves the poet to take her place at the side of Rachel, after having introduced him to St. Bernard. Dante looks again and sees Mary and Eve and Sarah, … and the gleaner-maid Meek ancestress of him, who sang the songs Of sore repentance in his sorrowful mood;
Dante was in full harmony with the orthodox faith of his age, and followed closely the teachings of Thomas Aquinas’ great book of divinity. 994 He accepted all the distinctive tenets of mediaeval Catholicism—purgatory, the worship of Mary, the intercession of saints, the efficacy of papal indulgences and the divine institution of the papacy. He paid deep homage to the monastic life and accords exalted place to Benedict, St. Francis and Dominic. But he cast aside all traditions in dealing freely with the successors of Peter in the Apostolic see. Here, too, he was under the direction of the beloved Beatrice. The evils in the Church he traced to her temporal power and he condemned to everlasting punishment Anastasius II. for heresy, Nicolas III., Boniface VIII. and Clement V. for simony, Coelestine V. for cowardice in abdicating the pontifical office, and a squad of other popes for avarice. Following the theology of Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, he put into hell the whole heathen world except two solitary figures, Cato of Utica, who sacrificed life for liberty and keeps watch at the foot of purgatory, and the just emperor, Trajan, who, 500 years after his death, was believed to have been prayed out of hell by Pope Gregory I. To the region of the Inferno, also, though on the outer confines of it, a place is assigned to infants who die in infancy without being baptized, whether the offspring of Christian or heathen parents. Theirs is no conscious pain, but they remain forever without the vision of the blessed. In the same vicinity the worthies of the old dispensation were detained until Christ descended after his crucifixion and gave them release. There, John the Baptist had been kept for two years after his pains of martyrdom, Par. xxxii. 25. In the upper regions of the hopeless Inferno a tolerably comfortable place is also accorded to the noble heathen poets, philosophers, statesmen and warriors, while unfaithful Christians are punished in the lower circles according to the degrees of their guilt. The heathen, who followed the light of nature, suffer sorrow without pain. As Virgil says: —
For such defects, and not for other guilt, Lost are we, and are only so far punished, That without hope we live on, in desire. Dante began his poem in Latin and was blamed by Giovanni del Virgilio, a teacher of Latin literature in Bologna, because he abandoned the language of old Rome for the vulgar dialect of Tuscany. Poggio also lamented this course. But the poet defended himself in his unfinished book, Eloquence in the Vernacular, De vulgari eloquio, 995and, by writing the Commedia, the Vita nuova, the Convivio and his sonnets in his native Florentine tongue, he became the father of Italian literature and opened the paths of culture to the laity. Within three years of the poet’s death, commentaries began to be written on the Divina Commedia, as by Graziuolo de’ Bambagliolo, 1324, and within 100 years chairs were founded for its exposition at Florence, Venice, Bologna and Pisa. A second service which Dante rendered in his poem to the coming culture was in bringing antiquity once more into the foreground and treating pagan and Christian elements side by side, though not as of the same value, and interweaving mythological fables with biblical history, classical with Christian reminiscences. By this tolerance he showed himself a man of the new age, while he still held firmly to the mediaeval theology. 996 Dante’s abiding merit, however, was his inspiring portrayal of the holiness and love of God. Sin, the perversion of the will, is punished with sin continuing in the future world and pain. Salvation is through the "Lamb of God who takes away our sins and suffered and died that we might live." This poem, like a mighty sermon, now depresses, now enraptures the soul, or, to use the lines of the most poetic of his translators, Longfellow,
Yet in thy heart what human sympathies, What soft compassion glows.
In spite of his priestly vows, Petrarca lived with concubines and had at least two illegitimate children, Giovanni and Francesca, the stain of whose birth was removed by papal bulls. In riper years, and more especially after his pilgrimage to Rome in the Jubilee year, 1350, he broke away from the slavery of sin. "I now hate that pestilence," he wrote to Boccaccio, "infinitely more than I loved it once, so that in turning over the thought of it in my mind, I feel shame and horror. Jesus Christ, my liberator, knows that I say the truth, he to whom I often prayed with tears, who has given to me his hand in pity and helped me up to himself." He took great delight in the Confessions of St. Augustine, a copy of which he carried about with him. Yüklə 3,88 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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