Renaissance

The Renaissance Again--and Again Author(s): J. H. Hexter Source: The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 23, No. 3 (Sep., 1951), pp. 257-261 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1872709 Accessed: 25-03-2020 08:15 UTC

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THE RENAISSANCE AGAIN-AND AGAIN

J. H. HEXTER

A PPEARING at this time, a discussion of The Renaissance in historical thought and The

counter-Renaissance' must begin with an apology to Ferguson. Through an oversight the Journal of modern history did not receive a copy of his book for two years after its publication, and thus consideration of it has been unduly de- layed. This accidental injustice to Ferguson is a boon to the reviewer. For purposes of comment the pairing of The Renaissance in historical thought with The counter-Renaissance is most convenient, since the latter is a resolute attempt to meet a problem in historical writing whose complexity and urgency the former reveals.

Under the appearance of simplicity which re- sults from the clarity of Ferguson's style, The Renaissance in historical thought is an intricate book. At its least integrated level it is a fine critical bibliography of most of the important works that have dealt with the Renaissance con- cept for a matter of five hundred years. Ferguson analyzes and comments on an appalling mass of historical studies in a manner that conceals both art and an incredible amount of patient study. Each separate comment is shrewd, judicious, and charitable, although the author occasionally with a mild grin exposes and thrusts aside the balderdash in his path. He has a special aptitude and predilection for demolishing German schol- ars of a romantic and nationalistic bent, whom he felicitously describes as begriff-stricken. This work of critical comment is enot;gh to render The Renaissance in historical thought indispen- sable to specialists in the field.

At another level Ferguson uses the Renais- sance concept as a sort of focusing mirror which reflects the main lines of development of intellec- tual sentiment for half a millennium. He shows how in every age the notions of intellectuals at large about the world at large left a distinct im- press on what historians of each age thought about the Renaissance. The broad and general conceptions of our ancestors, the assumptions, sometimes obscure or covert, that directed and limited their thought, these mental habits that often lurk so vaguely on the periphery of history

r The Renaissance in historical thought: five cen- turies of interpretation. By Wallace K. FERGUSON, professor of history, New York University. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., I948. PP. 407. $5.00. The counter-Renaissance. By DIRAM HAYDEN. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, I950. Pp. 687. $7.50.

suddenly become intelligible, clear, and distinct, when (thanks to Ferguson) we see them, as it were, standing for the last five hundred years at the elbow of the historians of the Renaissance, pouring ideas, prejudices, and preconceptions into their heads, almost palpably guiding their hands as they wrote. We may indeed become a little suspicious of the intellectual stability of our profession, when through Ferguson's eyes we watch our brethren spinning like weather- cocks at each shift of the winds of doctrine; but then as historians we are glad to know that in each age our predecessors have unconsciously provided us with so reliable an indicator of which way those winds were blowing.

Finally and primarily, The Renaissance in historical thought is the biography of an idea- the story of the Renaissance concept from its beginnings up to the year before last. As Fer- guson skilfully unfolds that story, he makes clear his belief that it is dominated by one man and one book-Jacob Burckhardt and The civiliza- tion of the Renaissance in Italy. To that man and book all lines of the growth of the concept lead, and away from them all lines of disintegration of the concept wander-each along its peculiar course.

The Renaissance concept certainly, the thing in itself perhaps, according to Ferguson, began in Italy with the notion that the fifteenth cen- tury saw a revival of antique learning and letters which had been allowed to lie dormant for cen- turies. To the idea of an Italian revival of classi- cal literature Giorgio Vasari added the idea of a simultaneous revival of classical art. North of the Alps the influence of Erasmus led to the coupling of the idea of religious with the idea of literary renovation; and the Reformation, in a backhanded way, accentuated the contrast be- tween the fifteenth Christian century and the preceding ten by painting the latter a uniform black comprised of ignorance, idolatry, and su- perstition. These vague beginnings were ac- cepted and made more precise but not much de- veloped or altered in the seventeenth century. The Renaissance concept was decisively ad- vanced toward maturity by Voltaire's elabora- tion of the principles of the history of culture. He sought to define the distinctive traits of each great historical epoch. The Protestant tradition provided him with a characterization of the middle ages altogether to his taste, an epoch red

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258 J. H. HEXTER

in tooth and claw and clerical black in every other respect. By way of contrast, the dawn of the modern era came in Italy with the emer- gence of a new way of life compounded of anti- papalism, civilized manners, cultivated tastes, and rationalism in religion and mode of living. The romantic movement created a new repre- sentation of the medieval period, transforming the darkness of the age of ignorance into the dim religious light of the age of faith; but, by trans- valuating the eighteenth century's valuation of the following age in an inverse sense, the ro- mantics maintained the element of sharp con- trast between the middle ages and what fol- lowed.

So, by the i830's most of the ingredients of the Burckhardtian concept of the Renaissance, including the name, were available to historians, and the period was beginning to be viewed as something distinct in itself, not merely as the first modern age. The idea that such a period must have sharp traits that distinguish it from all other ages and constitute its special Geist took hold on many historians through the influence of Friedrich Hegel.

In i86o the climactic work, The civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, was published. It cre- ated the orthodox historical tradition in the image of Jakob Burckhardt. Burckhardt's Ren- aissance was Italian, and it ran from the four- teenth to the early sixteenth centuries. It was modern and its basis was the unique position of the Italian city-states. It was rationalist and in- dividualist, nourished but not created by a new understanding of classical antiquity. Its dis- tinctive mark, in contrast with the preceding age, was its discovery of man's this-worldly ca- pacities and personality. Burckhardt document- ed his view of the Renaissance from a rich knowledge of the literature of the age in Italy and presented it with the finesse of a skilled artist.

Burckhardt's conception of the Renaissance was not seriously challenged or modified for forty years; but for the past half-century it has been beaten about unmercifully. Ferguson offers a patient and systematic account of its recent vicissitudes, and, after reading his narrative, one is not sure whether the concept has suffered worse at the hands of it? enemies who detest it, of its friends who in the process of saving it have modified it beyond recognition, or of the Boojum school that make it softly and silently vanish away. It is impossible here even to mention the vast variety of modifications, alterations, and revisions that Ferguson describes. What emerges

from his narrative, however, is the sense that positive knowledge about the period between I200 and i6oo has vastly increased in the last fifty years, while the relation and even the rele- vance of the concept "Renaissance" to the events of that period has become increasingly confused, obscure, and uncertain.

The chaos, made palpable in the later chap- ters of The Renaissance in historical thought, has long been a standing invitation for the intellec- tually intrepid or rash to leap in and get things squared away and straightened out. Hiram Hayden has accepted the invitation. His The counter-Renaissance is an "attempt to charac- terize" the Renaissance, roughly defined as the three centuries between "the crowning of Petrarch with laurel" and the death of Francis Bacon, and described as "the transition from the rnedieval to the modern world" (p. xi). What characterizes this transition period, according to Hayden, is "three large distinct intellectual movements" (my italics) (p. xi). A quick look at the index confirms what the phrase suggests. Among the forty-five leading characters in the book there is not a prince or a chief minis- ter, not a pope or a bishop (except St. Augus- tine), not a warrior or an explorer or a financier. The numerous references to two statesmen (Machiavelli and More) and two religious revo- lutionaries (Luther and Calvin) are deceptive, since all four are discussed not in connection with their active careers but solely as theolo- gians and philosophers. With such a cerebral cast we can hardly expect much action in the drama Hayden unfolds for us, and indeed we get very little. We hear nothing of the overseas ex- pansion of the Atlantic powers, nothing of the new .dynasties of international finance, nothing of the establishment of standing armies, nothing of the consolidation of dynastic territorial states, nothing of religious revolutions that shook great princes in their shoes. In fact, we hear nothing of any changes in social, economic, political, or re- ligious arrangements. Hayden, of course, is un- der no enforceable obligation to deal with such mundane matters. He should realize, however, that in completely disregarding them he is leav- ing out a great deal of what was involved in the transition from the medieval to the modern world. His reconceptualization of the Renais- sance almost by definition can give us but a very partial and one-sided glimpse of that process of transition.

If, however, the intellectual changes between Petrarch and Bacon are a good deal less than the whole of the transition from the middle ages to

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THE RENAISSANCE AGAIN-AND AGAIN 259

modern times, still they are an important part of that transition-a part, moreover, concerning the precise character of which there have been extreme and almost violent differences of opin- ion among historians. If The counter-Renais-

sance really succeeds in bringing some order out of this chaos, we should surely pardon Hayden's tendency to exaggerate the import of his own work, a weakness which after all he shares with all of us. What, then, is the pattern which Hayden discerns in the intellectual changes be- tween Petrarch and Bacon? There are, he says, "three large distinct intellectual movements dis- cernible between the mid-fourteenth and the early seventeenth century" (p. xi): the classical Renaissance, the counter-Renaissance, and the scientific reformation. Although the three move- ments overlapped, the above listing follows "the order in time of their strongest maturities" (p. xii). The classical Renaissance slightly modi- fied but "did not challenge the synthetic vision of Thomas Aquinas" (p. xiii). Its protagonists are marked by a belief in reason, in the essential goodness of nature, especially human nature, and in the consonance of the real with the ideal. They are preoccupied with "universal law and order, with design and purpose and unity, ... with the idea of limit (p. 293). . . . There are three basic concepts implying, or related to, 'limit,' which color almost all of their thought about reality and value: that of 'degree' or in- equality or gradation; that of finality or com- pleteness or finiteness; and that of harmony or moderation or balance" (p. 294)

The succeeding counter-Renaissance is char- acterized by its rejection of all Renaissance standards. Its religionists turn to faith and re- pudiate reason; its scientists are radical empiri- cists. Its historical, political, and ethical writers reject natural law and innate justice and give an almost exclusive value to the evidence of fact. "What unites these otherwise dissimilar think- ers . . . is that they share completely an anti- intellectualistic, anti-moralistic, anti-synthetic, anti-authoritarian bias" (p. xiii). With the scien- tific revolution, about which Hayden has not a great deal to say, there is a "return to confi- dence in reason-and-nature" but not to the Renaissance "reconciliation between theology and science" (p. xvi).

The first thing about Hayden's schema to catch our eye is his conception of the first or "Renaissance" movement. According to Hay- den, it was practically unchallenged from Pe- trarch to the beginning of the sixteenth century; but, if we investigate the fifteen principal writ-

ers to whom he ascribes an essentially Renais- sance world view, we run into a curious chrono- logical dilemma. Six of them had been dead from twenty-five to fifteen hundred years before Pe- trarch was crowned with laurel. Four of them were contemporaries of Francis Bacon, the last great exemplar of the counter-Renaissance, and four more-Ficino, Pico, Erasmus, and More- are clustered in the half-century that preceded the Reformation. The only major representative of the Renaissance movement, as Hayden con- ceives it, in its first century and a quarter is Petrarch himself, who stands at its beginning. This vacuum is a little perplexing, since it coin- cides exactly with what has traditionally been described as the age of the Renaissance in Italy, the Renaissance par excellence for most histori- ans since Burckhardt. Hayden, however, ex- plains the omission: "Italian humanism con- cerned itself vastly more with other aspects of man's life on earth than with the dutiful exercise of reason in pursuit of virtue" (p. 66); and elsewhere, "the humanism of the Renaissance (except in fifteenth century Italy) was basically Christian" (p. I4).

The implicit conclusion, therefore, is that Italian intellectual history from Petrarch to Ficino, because its humanism was not Christian, is outside the pale of the Renaissance move- ment. There is a touching though somewhat naive forthrightness about Hayden's method here. The history of ideas for almost half the Renaissance period must be omitted because it is recalcitrant to the author's reconceptualiza- tion of that period. Historians who have had the shattering experience of seeing a big beautiful iridescent idea blow up in their faces on contact with dull cold data are certain to sympathize with the feeling that informs Hayden's method. Yet, they are likely to feel that the orthodox procedure, which in such circumstances requires not the omission of the facts but the reconstruc- tion of the theory to conform with them, has, after all, considerable to be said for it. They are also likely to feel that an attempt that seeks to revivify the Renaissance concept and begins by cutting its heart out will perhaps fall somewhat short of complete success.

Actually, the situation is rather worse than has been indicated. Although Pico and Ficino are set down as exemplars of Renaissance hu- manism, the citations from the latter are, to say the least, ambiguous on this point (pp. 332, 335, 344, 348, 353, and 525), while practically all the subsequent mentions and citations from the former align him with the counter-Renaissance.

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260 J. H. HEXTER

Indeed, Hayden himself ultimately gives up the Count of Mirandola as a whited sepulcher, and characterizes him as a "romanticist of the Coun- ter-Renaissance" (p. 465). The cases of Petrarch and Erasmus are scarcely better. Hayden first pastes the Renaissance label on them and then rather consistently cites them as exemplars of counter-Renaissance tendencies. Thomas More comes through the ordeal unscathed; but that is the consequence of Hayden's rather selective methods of quotation. Any amateur reader of the Utopia could quickly come up with dozens of quotations to exemplify what Hayden describes as counter-Renaissance ideas. Alas, as a Renais- sance thinker St. Thomas More is not without blemish.

St. Thomas Aquinas is without blemish, and thereby, of course, hangs the tale. By a rather, complex ideological maneuver Hayden makes the author of the Summa theologica provide the standard by which men and ideas are judged orthodoxly Renaissance or heretically counter- Renaissance. The argument seems to go some- thing like this. The Renaissance was a humanist movement. The humanists (with certain excep- tions whom Hayden prefers to disregard) were Christian humanists. They drew their ethical ideas from the tradition of classical antiquity. Aquinas drew not only his ethics but his physics, metaphysics, and politics from the classical tra- dition. He was also very Christian. Therefore, he was the best Christian humanist of all; and by the same token the only truly Renaissance thought is that which does not deviate much from his ethics, metaphysics, physics, and poli- tics. This explains the difficulty that Hayden has in coming up with reliable exemplars of the Renaissance movement as he conceives it during the Renaissance period. There just were not many good Thomists around then. But then very few people have ever alleged that there were.

Thus, Hayden's conception of the Renais- sance suffers from a sort of malnutrition of his- torical content. His new conception the coun- ter-Renaissance-does not. All the rich intellec- tual diet that he has refused to the Renaissance has to be crammed into it, and the result is a rather obese disorganized notion. To bind so in- vertebrate a concept together and thus avoid a case of acute pterodactylism,2 HIayden devotes

2 The pterodactyl is an extinct bird or reptile with very individual traits. Pterodactylism is the assertion that all other creatures are alike in that they are not pterodactyls. This is perhaps true but not interesting.

the larger part of his big book to establishing what he believes to be connections among the various sixteenth-century writers who deviate from the classical, traditional, middle-course, humanist way of thinking. He somewhat sim- plifies his problem and gives a slightly specious appearance of absolute novelty to the counter- Renaissance by disregarding or brushing aside as atypical all medieval writing that possesses any trait that he ascribes to the counter-Renais- sance. Augustinian theology; Ockhamism; Ber- nardine, Victorine, and Germanic mysticism; goliardic poetry; the code of chivalry and court- ly love; the fabliaux; medieval satire; Francis- can simplicity-counter-Renaissance citadels right in the midst of the Aquinas country-are simply by-passed, and perhaps it is just as well. Anyone who undertakes to make Calvin and Luther, Paracelsus and Cornelius Agrippa, Machiavelli and Montaigne and Bacon, Bruno, Bodin, Raleigh, Rabelais, and Guicciardini march together like an army with banners has quite enough of a mission on his hands without worrying about anything else.

Sometimes the links putatively binding these rather diverse men together seem more than a little inadequate. The case of Calvin provides perhaps the best illustration of the length to which Hayden has to go to make things work out according to plan. There is, according to him, a "startling parallel" between Machiavel- li's Fortuna and Calvin's God. This parallel dis- regards the differences between the blind Dame who controls men only halfway, leaving the rest to their virtit, and the omnipotent ruler of the universe whose eternal decrees are immutable; but it is said to link Calvin with Machiavelli, a naturalist who denied limit. But Bodin denied limit by rejecting on historical grounds the medieval idea that the number of monarchies since the creation was limited to four, and Mon- taigne denied it too by doubting whether in their daily lives men acted as if they were limited by a natural moral law; and so Calvin is linked to Machiavelli, Bodin, and Montaigne, although it has taken something rather like punning to do it. Besides being a naturalist, Calvin is a romantic, which is the opposite of a naturalist but is also counter-Renaissance. He is a ro- mantic because "his insistence upon God's in- scrutable will and omnipotence and man's wretched helplessness . . . as surely splits the whole working principle of the relatedness of the ideal to the actual as does the defiant nihilism of some nineteenth-century Romantics" (p. I9). The man who spent boundless energy in making

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THE RENAISSANCE AGAIN-AND AGAIN 26I

the actual commercial town of Geneva conform to his ideal of the regnum Christi might object to this characterization, but it suffices, in Hayden's opinion, to bind him to such counter-Renais- sance romantics as Pico, Paracelsus, and Bruno. Through a series of such almost miraculous transformations the author of the Institutes of the Christian religion comes out with a "com- pletely ... anti-synthetic, anti-authoritarian bias."

This peculiar straining of analogies and stretching of the meanings of words is epidemic in The counter-Renaissance. And it is most un- fortunate because it serves to smother much that is excellent in the book. In the sixteenth century there were ways of thinking and feeling about life and the world that touched and colored with a like hue the views of men who in other respects were very different from one an- other. Hayden has discovered some of these common traits and revealed some remarkable and viable connections in the process. Indeed, he has discovered enough of them to filla book- a much shorter and better book than The coun- ter-Renaissance, and with a different name. What drove him beyond the excellent small book, for which he had ample material, to the unsatisfactory large one he wrote? I think he was driven by the mode of explanation that lay behind his conception. This mode of explanation is almost invisible in the book itself. Why the three phases of thought-Renaissance, counter- Renaissance, and scientific revolution should follow one another seems not to preoccupy Hay- den much. Yet he does have an explanation so slightly .mentioned that the reader is likely to overlook it. The counter-Renaissance was a re- action to and denial of the values of the Renais- sance. The scientific revolution brought to- gether the vital elements of both Renaissance and counter-Renaissance into a new way of thought, and the dialectical development of ide- as coincides roughly with the historical passage of time. In other words, what we have here is the Hegelian triad of thesis, antithesis, and syn- thesis; Renaissance, counter-Renaissance, and scientific revolution are Zeitgeister following the proper Hegelian pattern. Hayden's book illus- trates perfectly how a conception scarcely ad- verted to can dominate an elaborate intellectual work. Only under the spell of the Hegelian dia- lectic or its Marxian inversion would a writer dedicate himself to the foredoomed task of dem- onstrating a basic similarity among Vives, Cal- vin, Montaigne, Luther, Bruno, Rabelais, and Machiavelli. Only by emphasizing much that is

trivial and casual in their way of thought, mis- interpreting much that is not, and disregarding the rest can such spiritual incompatibles be made to appear as comrades in the same move- ment of thought. The idea of the absolute may not perhaps dominate history, but it almost al- ways dominates Hegelians, self-conscious or otherwise, who write history. Both the major weaknesses and the minor aberrations of The counter-Renaissance-strained analogies, irrele- vant or dubious examples, mystifying chronolo- gy-thus become intelligible. They are the cin- ders and ashes left behind when common sense and ordinary perspicacity are offered up in an auto-da-fe6 to the Hegelian dialectic.

So Hayden's study fails to lead us out of the historiographic muddle which the late chap- ters of The Renaissance in historical thought re- veal. It is but another member added to a mass of previous failures so numerous as to lead some historians to seek to avoid the perplexities of the Renaissance concept by dropping the term "Renaissance" from their historical repertoire altogether. Against such a renunciation Fergu- son quotes with approval the remark made by Henri Hauser in this connection, "It seems to me that, save in case of absolute necessity, it is a grave matter to renew in the scientific domain the miracle of the confusion of tongues" (p. 394). Yet we may wonder at this point whether we are not near to such an absolute necessity with respect to the Renaissance. For though a renewal of the confusion of tongues is hardly a desideratum, it is no more stultifying than the employment by different authors of the same term to signify two entirely separate historical periods, or, what is worse, to signify two simul- taneous, opposite, and mutually exclusive cul- tural constellations. Indeed, the confusion of tongues has already been renewed, since, when a historian uses the term "Renaissance," we are forced, before we proceed, to determine which of the numerous current meanings of the term he has in mind. As to "the essential question of the nature of Renaissance civilization, viewed in its entirety as a European phenomenon" (p. 397), there is simply no agreement among his- torians. Curiously enough, the author of The Renaissance in historical thought is one of the few historians whose opinions on the matter might carry enough weight to move his col- leagues toward a consensus. As Ferguson justly observes, "to do so would entail the writing of another book." We hope that Ferguson himself will write that book very soon.

QUEENS COLLEGE

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