The Renaissance

by Will Durant

In most philosophical faculties Scholasticism was still de rigueur, and already stiffening with the approach of death.

When he reached Plotinus, and himself translated the Enneads, he felt that he had found in mystic Neoplatonism the silken cord that would bind Plato to Christ.

Loquendum est ut plures, sentiendum ut pauci—”We must speak as the many do, we must think as the few.”

Wisdom seems always a reincarnation or echo, since it remains the same through a thousand varieties and generations of error.

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.

“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.”

if spirits could cure the ills of the flesh they would have to be material, or use material means, to affect a material body;

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.

like Plato, he justifies the inculcation of fables and myths if these can help to control the natural wickedness of men.

Most men, he thinks, are so simple mentally and so brutish morally that they must be treated as children or invalids.

“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.”

“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.”

Almost half the literature of the Renaissance is anticlerical.

“Come, let us conform to the popular error.”

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.

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.”

Taken together, this massive history, and the brilliant Storia Fiorentina, constitute Guicciardini as the greatest historian of the sixteenth century.

“I can create a hundred nobles in an hour,” he said, “but I cannot produce such an historian in twenty years.”

Doubtless all religions are based upon assumptions and myths, but these are forgivable if they help to maintain social order and moral discipline.

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.

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

Liberty is a cant term with them, and disguises their lust of superiority in power and honor.

To speak of the people is to speak of madmen, for the people is a monster full of confusion and error, and its vain beliefs are as far from truth as is Spain from India…. Experience shows that things very rarely come to pass according to the expectations of the multitude.… The reason is that the effects… commonly depend on the will of a few, whose intentions and purposes are nearly always different from those of the many.75

The man of ideas found himself face to face with the man of action, and did him homage; envy burned in the young diplomat’s soul as he realized the distance he had still to travel from analytical and theoretical thought to a magnificent crushing deed. Here was a man, six years younger than himself, who in two years had overthrown a dozen tyrants, given order to a dozen cities, and made himself the very meteor of his time; how weak words seemed before this youth who used them with such scornful scarcity!

And since Dante says that there could be no science without retaining that which is heard, I have recorded that which I have acquired from the conversation of these worthies,

He could not be a good diplomat because he was too visibly subtle, nor a good statesman because he was too intense, grasping ideas fanatically as in the portrait he tightly clasps the gloves that affirm his semigenteel rank.

These things are forgivable, for man was not made for monogamy; but less pardonable, though quite in harmony with the custom of the times, is the complete absence, from all of Machiavelli’s considerable surviving correspondence, of any word of tenderness—of any word—about his wife.

Politics he understands as the high art of creating, capturing, protecting, and strengthening a state.

“Valor produces peace; peace, repose; repose, disorder; disorder, ruin. From disorder order springs; from order, valor (virtù ); and from this, glory and good fortune.

“Fortune is the arbiter of one half our actions, but she still leaves us to direct the other half.”87 The more virtù a man has, the less will he be subject to fortune or yield to it.

This being so, men can be made good—i.e., capable of living with order in a society—only by the application, in sequence, of force, deceit, and habit.

But the lives of princes are short….

What he rejects most decisively in Christianity is its ethic, its conception of goodness as gentleness, humility, nonresistance; its love of peace and its denunciation of war; its assumption that states, as well as citizens, are bound by the one moral code.

politics, in the sense of statesmanship, must be held completely independent of morality.

Virtue, to a Roman, was not humility or gentleness or peace, but virility, manliness, courage with energy and intelligence.

It being my intention to write something that shall be useful to him who comprehends it, it appears to me more appropriate to follow up the real truth of a matter than the imagination of it.

The ruler should support religion, and should himself appear to be religious, whatever his private beliefs.114 Indeed, it is more important and profitable to the prince to seem to be virtuous than to be so.

Everyone sees what you appear to be, few know what you are; and those few dare not oppose the opinion of the many.

Philosophers have been well nigh unanimous in condemning The Prince, and statesmen in practising its precepts.

Machiavelli represents the ultimate challenge of a revived paganism to a weakened Christianity. In his philosophy religion becomes again, as in ancient Rome, the humble servant of a state which in effect is god.

Till then the nations will be as beasts in the jungle; and whatever principles their governments may profess, their practice will be that of The Prince.

NOWHERE are the prejudices of the historian so likely to mislead him as when he seeks to determine the moral level of an age—unless it be in the kindred inquiry into the decline of religious belief.

The spread of wealth weakened the ascetic ideal: men and women came to resent an ethic that had been born of poverty and fear, and that now ran counter to both their impulses and their means.

Perhaps next to wealth the main source of immorality was the political unsettlement of the times.

Enlightenment is of minorities, and emancipation is individual; minds are not freed en masse.

Powerful characters might laugh at all this while their health was good, but rare was the Renaissance Italian who did not ask for the sacraments on his deathbed.

Here again we must discount something, since no saint can be trusted to speak of human conduct without indignation.

Christ was not God, but was the son of Joseph and Mary, conceived in the usual ridiculous way; that Christ’s body was not in the consecrated wafer; and that His miracles had been performed not by divine power but through the influence of the stars;

man is by nature polygamous, and that only the strongest moral sanctions, a helpful degree of poverty and hard work, and uninterrupted wifely supervision, can induce him to monogamy.

each man was required to bring a woman of low resistance.