By Christopher Dawson
NORTH of the Alps also the influence of the Italian Renaissance was first felt in university circles, and the leaders of the movement in Germany, France and England, Reuchlin, Erasmus, Lefère d’Etables, Fisher and John Colet, still represented the medieval tradition of clerical learning and ecclesiastical society. Consequently it is not surprising that the Christian aspect of the Renaissance was even more strongly accentuated here that in the South, and the influence of Christian Platonism and of the Florentine Academy was stronger that that of the purely literary humanism of Poggio and Valla. But although this Northern humanism was overtly and consciously Christian, it aroused much sharper opposition from the representatives of the old order than was the case in Italy. The literary quarrels that were so numerous and bitter between the Italian scholars became transformed in the Gothic North into an ideological warfare between conservatives and the modernists in which the latter used the weapons of ridicule and vituperation against the monks and theologians, while the conservatives responded with accusations of heresy and ecclesiastical censures.
For these reasons the Northern humanists have been regarded as the forerunners and even the originators of the Reformation. And to a certain extent this is true. It was the humanists who began the public campaign against the corruptions and superstitions of the late medieval Church, and it was the greatest of them all, Erasmus of Rotterdam, who began the propaganda for a return to Christian antiquity and to the pure evangelical Christianity of the New Testament. Nevertheless the spirit of the German Reformation was entirely different from that of Erasmus, and when its character became plain, no one was more horrified than the humanists. It was a revolutionary movement of the most far-reaching kind which embodied all the elements in Northern Europe that were most alien from the ideals of the new humanists culture of the Mediterranean world. Its great leader, Martin Luther, was the supreme example of the antihumanist spirit, the enemy of moderation and human reason, an individualist who denied human freedom, a man of passion who condemned nature, a conservative who rejected tradition.
This inherent contradiction between Protestantism and Humanism became overt in the early years of the Reformation in the controversy between Luther and Erasmus on the Freedom of the Will, which led to a bitter antagonism between the two leaders and to the progressive estrangement of the German Reformation from the humanist culture. In this field, however, the success of Luther was far less complete than in the sphere of religion and politics. He destroyed the spiritual unity of medieval Christendom, the Roman order and the Catholic hierarchy together with the institutions and beliefs on which the medieval culture had been founded, above all the monastic orders, which had been for centuries the chief representatives of the higher culture and the teachers of the Christian people. And by so doing, there was generated, for the first time in Western history, a revolutionary attitude towards the past and to the inherited norms of culture. As Döllinger wrote, the new generations in the schools and universities “were taught to despise past generations and consequently their own ancestors as willingly plunged in error” and to believe “that the Popes and bishops, the theologians and the universities, the monasteries and all the teaching corporations had formed for centuries a vast conspiracy to deform and suppress the teaching of the Gospel.”*
This revolutionary change was even more serious than we can realize today, owing to its destructive effects on the mind of the masses and the education of the common people. In the Middle Ages that education has never been a matter of book learning. The main channels of Christian culture were, liturgical and artistic. The life of the community centered in the Church, in the performance of the liturgy and the cult of the Saints. The annual cycle of feasts and fasts was the background of social life, and every vital moment in the life of the community found in it an appropriate ritual and sacramental expression. Architecture and painting and sculpture, music and poetry were all enlisted in its service, and no one was too poor or too uneducated to share in its mysteries.
Now all this was swept away in the course of a single generation and a new Protestant culture had to be built up based almost exclusively on the study of the bible and the dogmatic theology of the new sects. There was a complete ideological separation between Catholic and Protestant Europe. Truth in one country was heresy in another; even the fundamental conceptions of the Christian life, or moral perfection, of sanctity and salvation were different.
If therefore the religious revolution of the Reformation had developed to its logical conclusion, there can be no doubt that Western Europe would have ceased to exist as a cultural unity. There would have been two completely separate cultures in the Protestant North and the Catholic South, divided by an iron curtain of persecution and repression which would, have made the two parts of Europe as alien and incomprehensible from one another as Christendom was from Islam.
For there were humanists in both camps from the first, and in spite of their theological opposition they remained in substantial agreement in their educational ideals and their concept of humane learning. It is true that the majority if the Northern humanists followed the example of Erasmus and soon lost whatever sympathies they had with the Protestant Reformers. But these were exceptions to the rule, especially in the younger generation, and the most important of these exceptions, Melanchthon, did all in his power to check the breakdown of culture and to establish a sound traditions of Protestant education. But his success was a very limited one, for German humanism never recovered from the shock of the Reformation. In the West, however, the situation was different. French Protestantism from the first found wide support in humanist circles. Calvin himself fully appreciated the importance of education and study. Wherever the Calvinists went, from Transylvania to Massachusetts, they brought with them not only the Bible and Calvin’s Institutes, but the Latin grammar and the study of the classics.
Meanwhile in Catholic Europe the influence of Christian humanism continued to develop. The leaders of Catholic culture in the age of the Reformation, like Cardinal Sadoleto’s treatise de liberis recte instituendis (1530) explains the ideals of humanism in their most mature form. After the Council of Trent the situation was changed by the Counter-Reformation and the drastic measures that were taken to repress Protestantism arid to reassert the control of the Church over literature and education. But there was no breach in the continuity of culture such as occurred in the North. The tradition of popular culture remained unchanged, and the Church used the new art and music and drama as the church of the Middle Ages had dome in the past. It was this permeation of Renaissance art and literature by the religious spirit of the Catholic revival which gave rise to the Baroque culture which in the seventeenth century spread over the whole of Catholic Europe and extended its influence into the North, in very much the same way as the Gothic art and culture had expanded four centuries earlier, in the opposite direction.
The carriers of this culture were the new religious orders, above all the Society of Jesus, which played a similar part in European culture in that later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to that which the Benedictines had played in the early Middle Ages or the Franciscans and Dominicans in the thirteenth century. Like them, the Jesuits owed their influence above all to their educational activities; and as the Benedictines had based their teaching on an adaption of the classical education of the later Roman Empire to Christian aims, so now the Jesuits adapted the new classical education of the humanists of the Renaissance to the religious ideals of the Counter-Reformation. The Jesuit Ratio Studiorum belongs to the same tradition as that of the humanist treatises on education of which I have spoken above. It was, however, more limited and more practical in its aims. Its originality lay in its technique and organization rather than in its subject matter. Nevertheless it did more than anything else to establish a common international standard of higher education, so that even in Protestant Europe the Jesuit schools met with the approval if such a revolutionary critic of education as Francis Bacon.**
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* Dollinger, The Reformation in Its Relations with the Schools and Universities and the Education of Youth in the Reformation, vol. I, p.397. (French trans.)
** “As for the Pedagogical part, she shortest rule would be ‘consult the schools of the Jesuits,’ for nothing better has been put in practice.” Bacon, de Augmentis Scientiarum, Bk. VI, ch. iv.
Source: Christopher Dawson. The Crisis of Western Education, Ch. III, “The Age of Humanism,” pp. 26-30.
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