RENAUDOT
769
RENAUDOT
inc, piety, niul obedience governing principles in his
plan (if rofuiin. The old system of arts and teaching
was aheady growing obsolete, previous to 14.50.
Humanism had begun to take the i)lace of Scholasti-
cism. Vittorino da Feltre (1378-1446), a devout lay-
man, set up his classes at Mantua in 1435 on the basis
of good Latin, including poetry, oratory, Roman his-
tory, and Stoic discipline. He gave an all-round
training, social, physical, religious. At Venice and
Ferrara his friend Guarino (1370-1460) was another
eminent schoolmaster, mighty in Greek. We have
seen how Erasmus by example and by criticism ad-
vanced the cause of literature, which was henceforth
acknowledged as the proper subject of a Uberal educa-
tion. A gentleman — the cortegiaiio whom Castighone
described — ought to be proficient in the language of
antiquity; such was the idea of the public school
everj'where; and such it remains in England to this
day. The Jesuit Order, springing up after 1530, not
founded on the tradition of Benedict or Dominic,
adopted this view, and their Ratio Studiorum"
(1599) was, in consequence, a hterarj' classical scheme.
The first of their colleges arose at Coimbra (1542);
in Paris they had the Hotel de Clermont ; in Germany
they began at Ingoldstadt. The German College at
Rome, due to St. Francis Borgia, hke the Roman
College of the Societj- itself, the EngUsh and other
houses governed by them, attested their zeal for learning and their success in controversy. The Fathers
were always cultivated men; they taught "a good
silver Latin"; and they wrote with ease, though
scarcely with such idiomatic %'ivacity as we admire in
Erasmus and Joseph Scaliger. Soon they possessed
a hundred hou.ses and colleges; '"For nearly three
centuries", says a recent critic, "they were accounted
the best schoolmasters in Europe." Bacon's judg-
ment can never be passed over: "As for the peda-
gogical part, the shortest rule would be, consult the
schools of the Jesuits; for nothing better has been put
in practice" (De Augment., VL 4). They established
free day-schools, devised new schoolbooks, expurgated
objectionable authors, preached sound doctrines in a
clear Latin style, and bestowed even upon the tech-
nicalities of medieval logic a certain grace. Some,
like Mariana, wrote with native power in the classic
forms. But their most telling man in the field of theol-
ogy is Peta\-ius, who belongs to France and the seven-
teenth century. His large volumes on the Fathers
may be compared in point of language with Calvin's
"Institutes" and the " Augustinus" of Jansen. They
discard the method familiar to Scotus and St. Thomas;
they furnish to some extent criticism as well as his-
tory. And they suggest the development of dogma
with an approach to its philosophy, which neither
Bossuet nor Bull could quite comprehend.
All these things form part of "that matured and completed Renaissance" whereby the evil was purged out which had made it perilous in the same degree to faith and to morals. Nicholas V and other popes did well in not refusing to add culture, even the finest of the Greek, to religion. Their fault lay in the weak- ness which could not resist pagan luxury and a friv- olous dilettantism. Now serious work was undertaken for the good of the Church. Gregory XIII reformed the calendar; the text of the canon law was cor- rected; under Sixtus V and Clement VIII the Latin Vulgate after years of revision attained its actual shape; and the Vatican Septuagint came forth in 1.587. Baronius, urged by St. Philip Neri, brought out eleven folio volumes of "the greatest church history ever written". The Roman Breviary, en- larged and edited anew, was republished by authority of St. Pius V and Urban VIII.
But the Renaissance had indulged its "pride of
state, of knowledge, and of system" with disastrous
consequences to our Christian inheritance. It
trampled on the Middle Ages and failed to understand
XII.— 49
that in them which was truly original. The Latin of
Cicero which Urban VIII cultivated, the metres of
Horace, did grievous wrong to the prose and verse of
our church offices, so far as they were altered. The
showy architecture now designed, though sometimes
magnificent, was not inspired by religion; before long
it sank to the rococo and the grotesque; and it filled
the churches with pagan monuments to disedifying
celebrities. In painting we descend from the heaven
of Era AngeUco to the " corregiosity " of Corregio,
nay, lower still, for \'enus too often masquerades as
the Madonna. Christian art became a thing of the
past when the Gothic cathedral was looked upon as
barbarous even by such champions of the Faith as
Bossuet and Fenelon. Never did a poet inspired by
Renaissance models — not even Vida nor Sannazzaro —
rise to the sublimity of the "Dies Irae" ; never did that
style produce a work equal to the "Imitation". Dante
triumphs as the supreme Catholic singer; St. Thomas
Aquinas cannot be dethroned from his sovereignty as
the Angelic Doctor, still, as regards faith and phi-
losophy, he is the true "master of those that know".
But Dante and St. Thomas lived before the Renais-
sance. It was not large or liberal enough to absorb
the Middle Ages. Hence its failure at the beginning
as a philosophic movement, its lack of the deepest
human motives, its superficiality and its pedantries;
hence, afterwards, its fall into the commonplace, and
the extinction of art in \Tilgarity, of literature in empty
rhetoric. Hence, finally, the need of a French Revolu-
tion to teach it that life was something more serious
than a "Carneval de Venise", and of Romanticism to
discover, among the ruined choirs and in the neglected
shrines which men had scornfully passed by, tokens of
that mighty medieval genius. Catholic, Latin, Teuton,
and French, misunderstanding of which was the folly,
and the spoiling of its achievements the crime, that
we must charge upon the Renaissance in the day of
its power. "It remained for a later age", says one
who glorified it, "to conceive the true method of
effecting a scientific reconciliation of Christian senti-
ment with the imagery, the legends, the theories about
the world, of pagan poetrj' and philosophy" (Pater,
"Renaissance", 49). Not less did it become the task
of Goethe, Scott, Chateaubriand, Ruskin, of Fried-
rich Schlegel and the best German critics, to show
that European culture, divorced from the Middle Ages,
would have been a pale reflection of dead antiquity.
Besides the monographs under special names, consult Cam~ bridge Mod. History, I (Cambridge, Eng., 1902) : Creiohton, History of the Papacy (2nd ed., London. 1897); Janssens, Ge.irh. des deuischen Volkes, tr. Christie (London, 1902 — ); Pastor, Ge^ch. der P&psle, tr. ANTHOBca (London, 1895 — ); BURCKHARDT, Die CulluT der Renaissance (Basle, 1860); Gei- GER, Humanismus in Ital, u. Deutschland (Berlin, 1882); MicH- ELET, Hist, de France, I (Paris, 1855); Stone, Reforma- tion and Renaissance (London, 1904) ; Stmonds, Renaissance in Italy (London, 1875-86) ; also, for details, BnRCARD, Diarium (Paris, 1883); Gasquet, £re of the Reformalion (.London, 1900); GoTHElx, Ignatius v. Loyola u. die Gegenreform (Halle, 1895); Hettinger, Kunst in Christ ejithum (Wurtzburg, 1867); Hofler, Rodrigo di Borgia (Vienna, 1888-89) ; Hughes, Loyola and the Educational System of the Jesuits (London, 1892); Infessura, Diario d. Citta di Roma (Florence, 1890) ; LiLLy, Renaissance Types (London, 1901); Kraus, Gesch, der christlich. Kunst (Freiburg, 1896-1908); KcNZ, Jacot IFtmpA<>ii7!fl (Lucerne, 1883); MOntz, Renaissance d I'epoque de Charles VIII (Paris. 1885); Idem, La Bibliolhique au Vatican (Paris, 1887); Monnier, Les arts a la cour des Rapes (Paris, 1878); Nichols, Select Epistles of Erasmus (tr. London, 1901); Rashdall. The Universities in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1895) ; Recsch, Index der verba- tenen BOcher (Bonn, 1883); Sadoleto, Epistola (Rome, 17(i0); ViLLARi, Savonarola (Florence, 1887), tr. London, 1890; Idem, Machiavelti (Florence. 1878-83; tr. London, 1900); Voigt, Enea Silvio Piccolomini (Berlin, 1856); Wood- ward, Vittorino da Feltre etc. (Cambridge, 1897). For judgments on the Renaissance from contrasted points of view, see Pater, Essays (London, 1873); Idem, The Renaissance (1873); Barrt, Heralds of Revolt (London, 1906); Ruskin, Modern Painters^ II; Idem, Stones of Venice, III (LondoD, 1903).
WiLUAM Barry.
Renaudot, ErsEBius, an apologetical writer and Orientalist, b. at Paris, '22 July, 1648; d. there, 1 Sept., 1720. He was educated by the Jesuits, and joined
