17. Rose, G. B. Renaissance Masters: Art of Raphael, Michelangelo, da Vinci, Titian, Correggio, and Botticelli. N. Y. and Lond., 1898. 18. Field, Lilian F. Introduction to Study of the Renaissance. N. Y., 1898. 19. Whitcomb, M. Source-Book of the Italian Renaissance. Phil., 1898. Transl. of pertinent passages from a wide range of contemporary literature: a work admirably conceived. See able articles in the Quar. Rev., Jan., 1878, and July, 1882; Cont. Rev., March, 1879; Church Quar. Rev., Lond., x, 339 ff., xxv, 362 ff.; Chr. Lit., iv, 96 ff., and Schaff in Ref. Quar. Rev., Oct., 1891, and in Papers of Am. Soc. of Ch. Hist., iii, 3 ff. SAINT PHILIP NERI. 1. Faber, F. W. The Spirit and Genius of Saint Philip Neri. Lond., 1850. 2. Passardierre, Jourdain de la. L'Oratorie de St. Ph. de Neri. Paris, 1880. 3. Bowden, C. H.. Life of Blessed John Juvenal Ancina, Companion of St. Philip Neri, Bishop of Saluzzo. N. Y., 1891. 4. Capecelatro, Alfonso. The Life of St. Philip Neri, Transl. by Thos. Alex. Pope. 2 vols. Lond., 1882. N. Y., 1894. 5. D'Orves, Etienne. S. Philippe de Neri. Paris, 1895. Apostle of Rome. CHAPTER XXXV. THE RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. THE Renaissance, or Revival of Letters, which in England and Germany was made subordinate and serviceable to a deep moral and religious earnestness, was in Italy predominantly pagan. Even those Italian scholars who retained their Christian faith led a kind of dual life, widely different from the spiritual unity of a Melanchthon or Colet, or even of an Erasmus. The latter showed a certain want of spiritual depth, yet his classical enthusiasm was essentially northern, not Italian; practical, not volup- PAGANISM OF tuously æsthetic. With the northern scholars gener- ITALIAN REally, his deepest interest was for the reestablishment NAISSANCE. of scriptural study in the originals. He desired to see Christian life refashioned after these, interpreted according to their natural sense, not turned away from this by the unbounded allegorizings and mystical expositions of the Middle Ages. In Italy no such serious and practical spirit could gain predominance. The whole doctrinal system, and the whole polity of the Church, had long since set and hardened into a shape which was not, indeed, wholly alien to the ends of the kingdom of God, but which seemed to be chiefly accommodated to the maintenance of Italian domination. Nowhere could the thought of reconstituting the Church after earlier, above all, after spiritual models, be more distasteful; for what guarantee was there that after such a refusion Rome and Italy would still be at the head? The Scripture warrant for their supremacy was certainly not ample. Moreover, the Italian temper has been described, not without warrant, as hard, positive, externalizing; in other words, as irreligious, or at the least unspiritual. What Heinrich Heine has said of the Latin language may be said of the whole Latin system, that Christianity has tried from the beginning to spiritualize it, and has finally given up the attempt in despair. The Italian distinctness INFLEXIBILIand perfection of form and balanced temperateness TY OF ROMAN have a worthy place in fashioning the fabric of truth, CATHOLICISM. but the knell of their crushing supremacy sounded four centuries ago. European history has since been largely the record of its struggles to avoid signing the act of its own abdication. Yet if even the grandeur of an Aquinas and the superhuman sublimity of a Dante, though of immortal value and efficacy, can no longer control the range of Christian thought and life, what hope is there for the dregs and leavings of those great minds? The great revival of the knowledge of ancient times, being therefore, in Italy, repelled from all reforming functions in belief and life, became principally æsthetic. Classical beauty was once more passionately worshiped, and as the worship had no moral rectification, the living God and the redeeming Christ being shut up under hierarchical guards, this worship of beauty passed at once into a worship of lust. The animal instincts, which had long been subjected, at least in theory, to an ascetic extremity of discipline, now burst forth into an exuberance of which the only adequate type is the bestial voluptuousness of satyrs, which, indeed, is chosen as the fitting expression for it by its great modern admirer and advocate, the novelist Zola. All control of the higher nature was absolutely refused, except as this was invoked to throw a transparent mantle of outer seemliness over the riotousness of mere animalism. A man was hardly accounted a true classical scholar unless he was believed to be given up to the practice of unnatural vice. And, as of old, we have here "lust hard by hate." Murder was calmly accepted as a constituent of ordinary life, whether by the dagOF MORALITY. ger or by the more refined administration of secret drugs. The perfection of vengeance was to be able to poison an enemy in the consecrated host. As to public morality, as we know, there can hardly be said to have been even the pretense of this. Machiavelli's Prince rests on two positions, that sovereign power is the sovereign good, and that all means are to be freely used which conduce to the acquisition of this without endangering its continuance. DISSOLUTION HYPOCRISY The holy see at first looked ambiguously on the Renaissance. The paganism of this, however, proved its protection. Paganism is not the mother of martyrs, and the reNAISSANCE. vived imitative paganism of the Renaissance least of all. Its votaries, indeed, would have been disconsolate had the Church been broken up, for they looked upon this as their heritage, whereby Italy was still to bear rule over the nations. They, therefore, affected a profound deference toward all the doctrines and dignities and dignitaries of the Church, and were at the summit of their wishes when they were invested with the purple of the monsignore, or, above all, with the cardinal's scarlet. The perfection of an ecclesiastical disciple of the Renaissance appears in the famous Cardinal Bembo, one of the great fathers of Italian literature. He was an enthusiastic admirer of Melanchthon, but could not forbear lamenting that so illustrious a scholar should be such a child as to believe in the life to come! MAGNIFI ROME. At first the papacy patronized only the sounder parts of the Renaissance, as we see in Nicholas V. Even he, UNSPIRITUAL however, had he lived, would have converted Rome CENCE OF into a magnificent exemplification of "the pride of life." The Italian Renaissance, we need hardly say, affected not so much the ethereal simplicity of Athenian classicism as its heavier and more pompous Roman reproduction. Florence, indeed, allowing for the greater substantiality of the Italian genius, has been rightly called the Athens of Italy; but Rome was ever Rome, magnificently ponderous, sensuous, oppressive even when good, and when evil, extravagantly bestial. Genial, of Nicholas V favored the Renaissance, but Pius II, Æneas Sylvius Piccolomini, embodied it. In him it showed rather its Hellenic than Roman form. This illustrious adventurer may be not ill described as the Themistocles of the Church. an understanding airy, but sound, adequate to every emergency, always supremely intent on his own advancement, but always waiting for it in cultivated and seemly leisureliness, he rose from grade to grade by a sort of natural necessity, until at last he found himself, under no suspicion of unbecoming intrigue, at the head of the Church. Grossly immoral until past the middle of life, and coarsely boasting of his immorality in his letters to his father, he yet, when declining passions made conversion easier, turned with a strange mixture of sincerity and calculation from the practice of vice to the practice of devotion, and, having then first been ordained priest, seems to have kept the sacerdotal character unsullied. At first strongly supporting the reforming projects of the council of Basel, of which his preeminent literary abilities soon made him the secretary (being then only in minor orders), he broke with the council when he saw that its heedless precipitancy would ruin its cause, and by a series of becomingly managed transitions went over to the papal side. When himself pope he solemnly condemned his own writings in defense of the council to be publicly burned. ENEAS SYLVIUS. The eulogy of the Encyclopædia Britannica, that for every stage of his life Æneas Sylvius developed the requisite qualities to compass it, and that at last he unfolded, in all their fullness, the virtues of the supreme pastor, takes no account of the self-interested char Few acter of his life, and of his sensual boastings of his own sensuality. Yet so much as this may be said, that he had a sanity of spirit which inclined him increasingly to good, and that his pontificate, closing his life, is the best part of it. He never disclosed any spiritual depth, but at least he was possessed by a generous enthusiasm for the rescue of Greek Christianity from the Ottoman yoke. scenes in history are more touching than the aged pope gazing from the heights of Ancona, determined to embark in person on the delivering fleet, straining his eyes for the sight of the Venetian squadron that never came, and then going back to his bed to die. Were there an Æneas Sylvius in Europe now, the diabolical murderousness of the unspeakable Turk might be brought to a speedy close. Paul II succeeded in crushing the Husites of Bohemia by involving Hungary in a crusade against them, which broke their forces and gave up middle Europe to Ottoman ravages. This was the last exercise, by the papacy of the Renaissance, of an act of mediæval power. Thenceforth, for several generations, the papacy sank into a mere secular, unscrupulous Italian · principality, a mockery on its spiritual side to the Italians, and a burden to the northern nations, whose stubborn loyalty to the power that had once guided their education out of heathen barbarism was fast wearing out. PAUL II. SIXTUS IV. Sixtus IV, before his papacy general of that once most unworldly of orders, the Franciscan, gave himself up, after election, to unbounded nepotism. To advance his brutal and immoral nephews was about his only serious thought. To this end he did not even shrink, in the conspiracy against the Medici, from a virtual complicity with murderers. Care for the purification of the Church, at center or borders, was hardly even affected. His confirmation of the Spanish Inquisition cannot well be laid up against him, for he held back until there seemed danger of a schism, and even then initiated a long series of papal interferences in Spain which rescued innumerable victims. The sensible bull confirming English peace by sanctioning the Tudor succession must also count in his favor. Innocent VIII first raised to doctrinal authority the horrible INNOCENT superstitions concerning witchcraft. This terrible act marked the decline of Catholic faith, not its vigor. For nearly four centuries it gave up to torturing death hundreds of thousands, some say even millions. Personally, Innocent, a careful father of many children, is de |