European Renaissance Represents a Rebirth

¶ … European Renaissance represents a rebirth of Classical art and culture. That era's greatest artists, writers, and thinkers looked back into the past for inspiration. Architects again made use of the classical orders, of foliated capitals, and fine Greco-Roman proportions. Yet the influence of the Classical World on Renaissance Europe was considerably more profound than is often realized. In rediscovering the Classical canon, the men and women of the renaissance were reestablishing a way of viewing the world that would affect nearly every aspect of Western thought. No longer would the cosmos be safe and static. No more would kings and statesmen see themselves as the reincarnations of some ancient archetype. What the leading minds of the Renaissance discovered was that history was linear - change was inevitable and constant. To an extent that went even beyond their Classical forbears, they began to understand that the men and women of today were the creations of those who had lived before them. Contemporary culture and civilization were the result of a long process of development and synthesis that had begun long ago, and continues relentlessly and unceasingly. History was a process; not an absolute. The idea that the cosmos was forever in a state of flux spelled the end of an entire world-view. Yet what specific ideas and discoveries had given rise to these changes, and what did they mean for the people of the Renaissance, and for us, their descendants?

According to traditional ideas, the Universe had been created by an all-powerful, all-knowing, and ever-present Deity. Things existed because God willed them to exist. This was as true of physical entities - people, animals, plants - as it was true of ideas and attitudes. God made laws almost in the manner of an earthly king. He made these laws, but He could also change them... At will. The existence of apparent patters proved only that Providence saw something good, or significant, in these particular creations, or actions. Every single object in the Universe possessed a purpose; a place in God's Grand Plan. Even the apparently evil had some role to play, either as a thing to which goodness might be compared, or as a way of strengthening, or fortifying God's Good Creation. Medieval man looked to the Bible for answers. He plumbed the depths of ancient words to divine hidden meanings. In the past, in religious and secular traditions that had been hallowed by Time, he sought the secrets of existence... And of Order. For all its seeming chaos, the Medieval World was a paragon of order.

In the Middle Ages, the ultimate authority on history, as on all else, was the Bible. Christianity influenced and shaped even pre-existing ideas about the Past. Traditional tribal histories were recast in a Christian mold, and accounts of Ancient Times together with long regal genealogies, and myths, were ultimately fitted into a complex Biblical scheme. Whatever was remembered of Classical mythology and history was likewise joined to the Biblical accounts. Examples of this pattern can be found all over Europe. In England, the reigning monarchs were traced back to Brutus (change the first "u" to an "i" and you have the root of the name "Britain"), and from him to Aeneas, and on up through all of the old Greek gods.

In similar fashion, the Classical legends that had themselves been interlarded with national folk histories became joined to Biblical events. Most Christian peoples developed a pedigree that somehow related back to Noah and one of his sons - or better yet - an eponymous grandson or great-grandson. The medieval chroniclers shaped a Comprehensive and powerful history of the world. They wove biblical history, ancient myths, and medieval Trojan legends together into a single story. Noah -- the only pious member of the race of giants that inhabited the prelapsarian world -- became the father not just of Shem, Ham, and Japhet but of a pride of other giants. His sons in turn insinuated themselves into national mythologies of the most diverse kinds,

Such fanciful histories satisfied the Medieval yearning for a clear explanation of current circumstances. They also revealed the centrality of Christianity, and Christian teachings in the history of all the peoples of Europe. In reality, the Old Testament does not mention Europe at all, but the Medieval historians, by bringing forth their apocryphal accounts, wove the strands of European history and culture into the sacred fabric of Christian lore. The Bible was shown to possess a direct relevance to the peoples of Europe, and in particular, their rulers.

The Renaissance marked the first time in centuries that Europeans had launched anything like a concerted and scientific attempt to investigate and record the Past. In rediscovering the works of the great Classical historians - Tacitus, Livy, Herodotus - the scholars of the later Middle Ages and Early Renaissance were digging into more than simply a huge treasure-trove of information - they were also unearthing a long-lost method of logic and inquiry. The Greeks had developed a method of recording history that, while not up to the full rigors of modern scholarship, was nevertheless, considerably more apt to produce a factual narrative than the usual medieval method of simply taking down any account or tradition. At the outset, Ancient Greeks interested in the history of their own cities and families were faced with many of the same options as Medieval scholars.

For the colour and substance of narrative history the inquirer was essentially dependent on oral tradition, the narrative ingredient of conversation, unsystematic, often morally or politically tendentious, constituting a stock from which obsolete items tend to be shed as newer material is fed in.

The Greeks, in particular Herodotus, were the first to recognize that any historical account was told from a particular point-of-view, and that existing stories might not necessarily match actual events. It would be necessary, at the very least, to take down different versions of the same events and compare them.

Herodotus did at least three things that have remained central to the construction of historical cases up to the present. First, he accounted for himself and his own perspective in the narrative. Second... [he] was motivated to preserve his discussion from decay. Third, Herodotus acknowledged his sources and the existence of multiple tellings of a single tale.

In reexamining these ancient histories, the great minds of the Renaissance were beginning to set limits on what was acceptable and what was not acceptable in academic research. One had to be critical of the material before oneself, not always automatically assuming that all was correct, or that the recorder of that material had been unbiased, or had even been properly qualified to give the information at hand.

Still more significant to our purpose was the discovery by the scholars of the Renaissance that in order for they themselves to understand the Classical histories, they would have to undertake an exhaustive analysis of the texts of the Ancients. This entailed far more than the original goal of simply copying what was general believed to be the superior knowledge and technique of those who gone before them, and who had lived at a time that the Renaissance thinkers viewed as somehow "ideal."

The fact is that from the very beginning, Renaissance humanism and the revival of antiquity concealed a paradox. On the one hand, the humanists had resurrected the classics for immediate use and set about imitating them for the practical purposes of their own time and place....On the other hand, the recovery of the ancient authors seemed to require, in order to make sense of them, the recovery of the whole world in which they lived and worked and wrote. As a result, Renaissance scholars invented many of the techniques and methods of modern philology.... [with] their scholarship some of them began to chip away insidiously at the props that underlay that view of the ancient world. They began to perceive anomalies in the old authors... And so set them at a distance. Thus the insistence on idealizing the ancients encountered -- and to some extend arrested -- the developing modernist sense of history.

In other words, in order to understand the world they so idolized, the scholars of the Renaissance were compelled to develop the roots of all of the modern scientific and investigative disciplines. Then, once developed, these new investigative techniques allowed them to expose those falsehoods that existed in the ancient accounts and to devise better, and more accurate, methods of examining both these ancient texts, and their own "modern" history. Building on the work done by the great Classical authors, the leading lights of the Renaissance soon developed a scholarship unlike any that had existed before. The scientific method was coming into being.

One of the earliest attacks on traditional authority came with Lorenzo Valla's questioning of the authenticity of the Donations of Constantine.

Until the writings of this Fifteenth Century scholar, the Donations had been accepted as fact. Invented hundreds of years before, they had served the Medieval Church well as the justification for the Pope's temporal sovereignty over Rome, and Central Italy. The Donations of Constantine were in fact a fraud - a fact that could only have been revealed through the subjecting of the "original" document to unbiased evaluation. Yet Leonardo Bruni, much more than Valla, deserves the credit for shaping the modern idea of history. Advancing on the style and technique of such Classical authors as Herodotus and Thucydides, Bruni developed a more modern, and scientific approach to the subject. Though not all of his writings can be taken as shining exemplars of the new commitment to accuracy and truth, Bruni at his best, charted new territory for historical scholarship.

Bruni's monumental Historiarum Florentini Populi Libri XII (hereafter Historiae) is often singled out as an exemplary work, one that set the whole enterprise of history writing on a new plane.... Bruni destroys the legends surrounding the founding and early history of Florence, and then recasts the story on the basis of hard evidence.... Bruni's recourse to... classical rhetorical devices did not in itself preclude the application of critical categories.... Bruni's Historiae are best seen as a projection of the values championed by the city's emerging political elites. Bruni's critique of earlier versions of the Florentine past is thus not the product of a pure scholar seeking to reconstruct the past. It corresponds instead to a new ethos, one of whose chief characteristics was a detached, skeptical attitude towards consolidated traditions, both cultural and political.

Once the questioning begins it is difficult to stop. Renaissance scholars soon took the fledgling historical method in new directions.

Niccolo Machiavelli extended the discussion of the past to a discussion of the present. Machiavelli's the Prince was meant to serve as a model for the rulers of his own day. Broadening the scope of scientific investigation, Machiavelli saw history as akin to medicine.

Medicine and history resembled one another in that both stored up past experience for present practical purposes. In the preface to the Discourses, he noted that the basis of medicine was "nothing other than the experiments made by the ancient physicians, on which present physicians base their judgements," and deplored the failure of princes and republics to use ancient experience of government in the same way.

To most individuals of the New Millennium, there can be few disciplines that are more scientific than medicine. To conceive of a connection in method between history and medicine, was to realize that history could be as minutely and factually dissected as the human body. It also meant that the lessons of the past could be seen as part of a genuinely verifiable formula for development. One could examine past "experiments," rate their effectiveness, and use the data gained therefrom to postulate new experiments, and new outcomes. In the Prince, Machiavelli was endeavoring to show the rulers and politicians of his own day that politics was a science, like anything else. It was his acceptance of the validity of investigation leading to proof - his validation of the scientific method - that gave added weight to his own theories. The new ideas postulated by Machiavelli could be shown to possess a firm factual underpinning. The rulers of Fifteenth Century Italy could understand the utility of things that had been proved to work. They could also glean the new lesson that logic, reason, and scientific methods of deduction were of value to themselves and their successors. The Prince encouraged rulers to govern in a rational manner. This great work of political science ushered in a new era in state administration, foreign relations, and the response of governments to a whole range of potential problems.

Machiavelli's ideas would be the inspiration for still others. Erasmus would, in the following century, put forth a clear statement of the historical method. He employed rigid theoretical guidelines in his work on St. Jerome.

Erasmus wrote a critical and well-documented life of Jerome which also had a definite rhetorical character and which shared in his basic aim to reform theology. In the opening section of the life he also set down the critical standards that would guide him in his narrative, and he produced a remarkable statement on historical method.

Erasmus' work once more expanded the range of the historical method, and scientific, rational thinking. By applying the historical method to a work of theology, the philosopher was recognizing that even the mystical cosmos conformed to certain recordable and reproducible laws. He also showed the way forward to a learned discussion of ideal situations based on real-life past instances, and a spirit of experimentation. Erasmus attempt to describe a possible Utopia represented a more comprehensive, and still more humane, use of the historical method than that which had been attempted by Machiavelli. Machiavelli had employed the rationality of the historical method, and historical perspective, in what was essentially a primer for dictatorship - a guide to the personal aggregation of absolute power.