The Renaissance

  The book ran into a storm. The Fransciscan friars persuaded the doge of Venice to order all procurable copies to be publicly burned, which was done. Protests were made to the papal court, but Bembo and Bibbiena were then high in Leo’s councils, and advised him that the conclusions of the book were perfectly orthodox; the conclusions were. Leo was not fooled; he knew quite well this little trick of the two truths; but he contented himself with ordering Pomponazzi to write a decent word of submission.45 Pietro complied in Apologiae libri tres (1518), reasserting that as a Christian he accepted all the teaching of the Church. About the same time Leo commissioned Agostino Nifo to compose an answer to Pomponazzi’s book; as Agostino loved controversy, he executed this assignment with pleasure and skill. It is remarkable, and perhaps illustrates a continuing antipathy between the universities and the clergy, that while Pomponazzi’s head hung, so to speak, in this Inquisitorial balance, three universities competed for his services. Hearing that Pisa was seeking to lure him to her halls, the magistrates of Bologna, formally subject to the pope but deaf to the Franciscan furor, confirmed Pomponazzi’s professorial tenure for eight years further, and raised his annual salary to 1600 ducats ($20,000?).46

  In two minor books, which he did not publish in his lifetime, Pomponazzi continued his skeptical campaign. In De incantatione he reduced to natural causes many supposedly supernatural phenomena. A physician had written to him about cures allegedly due to incantations or charms; Pietro bade him doubt. “It would be ridiculous and absurd,” he wrote, “to despise what is visible and natural in order to have recourse to an invisible cause the reality of which is not guaranteed to us by any solid probability.”47 As a Christian he accepts angels and spirits; as a philosopher he rejects them; all causes under God are natural. Reflecting his medical training, he laughs at the widespread belief in occult sources of cure: if spirits could cure the ills of the flesh they would have to be material, or use material means, to affect a material body; and he ironically pictures the healing spirits as rushing about with their paraphernalia of plasters, ointments, and pills.48 However he admits certain curative powers in some plants and stones. He will accept the miracles of the Bible, but suspects that they were natural operations. The universe is governed by uniform and invariable laws. Miracles are unusual manifestations of natural forces whose powers and methods are only partly known to us; and what the people cannot understand they ascribe to spirits or to God.49 Without contradicting this view of natural causation, Pomponazzi accepts much of astrology. Not only are the lives of men subject to the action of the heavenly bodies, but all human institutions, he thinks, even including religions, rise and flourish and decay according to celestial influences. This is true also of Christianity; at the present moment, says Pomponazzi, there are signs that Christianity is dying.50 He adds that as a Christian he rejects all this as nonsense.

  His final book, De fato, seems more orthodox, for it is a defense of free will. He admits its incompatibility with divine foreknowledge and omniscience, but stands on his consciousness of free activity, and on the necessity of assuming some freedom of choice if there is to be any moral responsibility in man. In his treatise on immortality he had faced the question whether a moral code could succeed without supernatural punishments and rewards. He held, with stoic pride, that the sufficient reward of virtue is virtue itself, not any post-mortem paradise;51 but he confessed that most men can be induced to decency only by supernatural hopes and fears. Hence, he explained, great legislators have taught the belief in a future state as an economical substitute for ubiquitous police; and, like Plato, he justifies the inculcation of fables and myths if these can help to control the natural wickedness of men.52

  Therefore they have posited, for the virtuous, eternal reward in another life, but, for the sinful, eternal punishments, which frighten them very greatly. And the greater part of men, if they do good, do it more from fear of eternal punishment than hope of eternal good, since the punishments are more known to us than those eternal goods. And since this last device can benefit all men, of whatever class they are, the legislator, seeing the proneness of men to evil, and intending the common good, has decreed that the soul is immortal, not caring for truth but only for righteousness, so that he may bring men to virtue.52a

  Most men, he thinks, are so simple mentally and so brutish morally that they must be treated as children or invalids. It is not wise to teach them the doctrines of philosophy. “These things,” he says of his own speculations, “are not to be communicated to common people, for they are incapable of receiving these secrets. We must beware even of holding discourse concerning them with ignorant priests.”53 He divides mankind into philosophers and religious persons, and innocently believes that “philosophers alone are the gods of the earth, and differ as much from all other men, of whatever rank and condition, as genuine men differ from those painted on canvas.”54

  In humbler moments he realized the narrow limits of human reason, and the honorable futility of metaphysics. He pictured himself in his later years as worn and haggard with thought about it and about, and likened the philosopher to Prometheus, who, because he wished to steal fire from heaven—i.e., snatch at divine knowledge—was condemned to be bound to a rock and to have his heart gnawed at by a vulture endlessly.55 “The thinker who inquires into the divine mysteries is like Proteus…. The Inquisition persecutes him as a heretic, the multitude mocks him as a fool.”56

  The controversies in which he engaged wore him down and helped to ruin his health. He suffered from one illness after another, until finally he determined to die. He chose a hard form of suicide: he starved himself to death. Resisting every argument and every threat, and triumphing even over force, he refused either to eat or to speak. After seven days of this regimen he felt that he had won his battle for the right to die, and might now safely speak. “I depart gladly,” he said. Some one asked him, “Where are you going?” “Where all mortals go,” he answered. His friends made a final effort to persuade him to eat, but he preferred to die (1525).57 Cardinal Gonzaga, who had been his pupil, had the remains transported to Mantua and buried there, and, with typical Renaissance tolerance, raised a statue to his memory.

  Pomponazzi had put into philosophic form a skepticism that had for two centuries been attacking the foundations of Christian belief. The failure of the Crusades; the influx of Moslem ideas through Crusades, trade, and Arab philosophy; the removal of the papacy to Avignon and its ridiculous division in the Schism; the revelation of a pagan Greco-Roman world full of wise men and great art and yet without the Bible or the Church; the spread of education, and its increasing escape from ecclesiastical control; the immorality and worldliness of the clergy, even of popes, suggesting their private disbelief in the publicly professed creed; their use of the idea of purgatory to raise funds for their purposes; the reaction of the rising mercantile and moneyed classes against ecclesiastical domination; the transformation of the Church from a religious organization into a secular political power: all these factors, and many more, combined to make the Italian middle and upper classes, in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century, “the most skeptical of European peoples.”58

  It is clear from the poetry of Politian and Pulci, and the philosophy of Ficino, that the circle of Lorenzo had no actual belief in another life; and the sentiment of Ferrara appears in the fun that Ariosto makes of the inferno that to Dante had seemed so frightfully real. Almost half the literature of the Renaissance is anticlerical. Many of the condottieri were open atheists;59 the cortigiani or courtiers were far less religious than the cortigiane or courtesans; and a polite skepticism was the mark and requisite of a gentleman.60 Petrarch lamented the fact that in the minds of many scholars it was a sign of ignorance to prefer the Christian religion to pagan philosophy.61 In Venice, 1530, it was found that most of the upper ranks neglected their Easter duty—i.e., did not go to confession and communion even once a year.62 Luther claimed to have found a saying current among the educated classes in Italy on
going to Mass: “Come, let us conform to the popular error.”63

  As to the universities, a curious incident reveals the temper of professors and students. Shortly after Pomponazzi’s death his pupil Simone Porzio, invited to lecture at Pisa, chose as his text Aristotle’s Meteorology. The audience did not like the subject. Several cried out impatiently: Quid de anima?—“What about the soul?” Porzio had to set the Meteorology aside and take up Aristotle’s De anima; at once the audience was all attention.64 We do not know whether in that lecture Porzio expressed his belief that the human soul differs in no essential point from the soul of a lion or a plant; we do know that he so taught in his book De mente humana—On the Human Mind;65 and he seems to have escaped unharmed. Eugenio Tarralba, indicted by the Spanish Inquisition in 1528, related that as a youth he had studied in Rome under three teachers, all of whom taught that the soul was mortal.66 Erasmus was astonished to find that at Rome the fundamentals of the Christian faith were topics of skeptical discussion among the cardinals. One ecclesiastic undertook to explain to him the absurdity of belief in a future life; others smiled at Christ and the Apostles; many, he assures us, claimed to have heard papal functionaries blaspheming the Mass.67 The lower classes kept their faith, as we shall see; the thousands who heard Savonarola must have believed; and the example of Vittoria Colonna shows that piety could survive education. But the soul of the great creed had been pierced with the arrows of doubt; and the splendor of the medieval myth had been tarnished by its accumulated gold.

  V. GUICCIARDINI

  The mind of Guicciardini summarizes the skeptical disillusionment of the times. It was one of the sharpest minds of the age; too cynical for our taste, too pessimistic for our hopes, but penetrating as a roving searchlight in the skies, and candid with the frankness of a writer who has wisely resolved on solely posthumous publication.

  Francesco Guicciardini had the initial advantage of aristocratic birth. From his childhood he heard educated conversation in good Italian, and learned to accept life with the realism and grace of a man confident of his footing. His great-uncle was several times gonfalonier of the republic; his grandfather held in turn most of the principal offices in the government; his father knew Latin and Greek, and filled several diplomatic posts; “my godfather,” wrote Francesco, “was Messer Marsilio Ficino, the greatest Platonic philosopher then in the world”68—which did not prevent the historian from becoming an Aristotelian. He studied civil law, and at the age of twenty-three was appointed professor of law at Florence. He traveled widely, even to noting “the fantastic and bizarre inventions” of Hieronymus Bosch in Flanders.69 At twenty-six he married Maria Salviati “because the Salviati, in addition to their wealth, surpassed other families in influence and power, and I had a great liking for these things.”70

  Nevertheless he had a passion for excellence, and the self-discipline to create works of literary art. His Storia Fiorentina, written at twenty-seven, is one of the most surprising products of an age when genius, swollen with its recovered heritage but loosened from tradition, flowed full and free in a dozen streams. The book limited itself to a short segment of Florentine history, from 1378 to 1509; but it treated that period with an accuracy of detail, a critical examination of sources, a penetrating analysis of causes, a maturity and impartiality of judgment, a command of vivid narrative in fine Italian, that were not matched by the Storie Fiorentine that Machiavelli wrote eleven years later in the sixth decade of his life.

  In 1512, still a youth of thirty, Guicciardini was sent as ambassador to Ferdinand the Catholic. In quick succession Leo X and Clement VII made him governor of Reggio Emilia, Modena, and Parma, then governor general of all the Romagna, then lieutenant general of all papal troops. In 1534 he returned to Florence, and supported Alessandro de’ Medici throughout that scoundrel’s quinquennium of tyranny. In 1537 he was the chief agent in promoting the accession of Cosimo the Younger to be Duke of Florence. When his hopes of dominating Cosimo faded, Guicciardini retired to a rural villa to write in one year the ten volumes of his masterpiece, the Storia d’ltalia.

  It is inferior to his earlier work in freshness and vigor of style; Guicciardini had meanwhile studied the humanists, and slipped into formality and rhetoric; even so it is a stately style, presaging Gibbon’s monumental prose. The subtitle, History of the Wars, limits the subject to matters military and political; at the same time the field is widened to all Italy, and to all Europe as related to Italy; this is the first history to view the European political system as a connected whole. Guicciardini writes of what for the most part he knew at first hand, and, toward the end, of events in which he had played a part. He collected documents sedulously, and is far more accurate and reliable than Machiavelli. If, like his more famous contemporary, he returns to the ancient custom of inventing speeches for the persons of his tale, he frankly states that they are true only in substance; some he specifies as authentic; and all are used effectively to state both sides of a debate, or to reveal the policies and diplomacy of the European states. Taken together, this massive history, and the brilliant Storia Fiorentina, constitute Guicciardini as the greatest historian of the sixteenth century. As Napoleon was anxious to see Goethe, so Charles V, at Bologna, kept lords and generals waiting in an anteroom while he conversed at length with Guicciardini. “I can create a hundred nobles in an hour,” he said, “but I cannot produce such an historian in twenty years.”71

  As a man of the world he did not take too seriously the efforts of philosophers to diagnose the universe. He must have smiled at the excitement aroused by Pomponazzi, if he noticed it. Since the supernatural is beyond our ken, he considered it useless to war over rival philosophies. Doubtless all religions are based upon assumptions and myths, but these are forgivable if they help to maintain social order and moral discipline. For man, in Guicciardini’s view, is by nature self-seeking, immoral, lawless; he has to be checked at every turn by custom, morals, law, or force; and religion is usually the least disagreeable means to these ends. But when a religion becomes so corrupt that it has a demoralizing rather than a moralizing influence, a society is in a bad way, for the religious supports of its moral code have been sapped. Guicciardini writes, in his secret record:

  To no man is it more displeasing than to me to see the ambition, covetousness, and excesses of priests, not only because all wickedness is hateful in itself, but because… such wickedness should find no place in men whose state of life implies a special relationship to God…. My relations with several popes have made me desire their greatness at the expense of my own interest. Had it not been for this consideration, I would have loved Martin Luther as myself; not that I might set myself free from the laws imposed upon us by Christianity… but that I might see this swarm of scoundrels (questa caterva di scelerati) confined within due limits, so that they might be forced to choose between a life without crime or a life without power.72

  Nevertheless his own morality was hardly superior to that of the priests. His personal code was to adjust himself to whatever powers were at the moment supreme; his general principles he kept for his books. There, too, he could be as cynical as Machiavelli:

  Sincerity pleases and wins praise, dissimulation is censured and hated; the former, however, is more useful to others than to oneself. Therefore I should praise him whose usual mode of life was open and sincere, and who only used dissimulation in certain things of great importance; it then succeeds all the better, the more one has contrived to establish a reputation for sincerity.73

  He saw through the shibboleths of the various political parties in Florence; each group, though it shouted for liberty, wanted power.

  It seems clear to me that the desire of dominating one’s fellows and asserting superiority is natural to man, so that there are few so in love with liberty that they would not seize a favorable opportunity of ruling and lording it. Look closely at the behavior of the indwellers of the selfsame city; mark and examine their dissensions, and you shall find that the object is preponderance
rather than freedom. Those, then, who are the foremost citizens do not strive after liberty, though that be in their mouths; but the increase of their own sway and pre-eminence is really in their hearts. Liberty is a cant term with them, and disguises their lust of superiority in power and honor.74