The Crisis of Western Education (The Works of Christopher Dawson)

III. The Age of Humanism

iii The Age of Humanism The higher culture of modern europe, and of america also, has been formed by the educational tradition that had its roots in the italian renaissance. it was a tradition that had its center not so much in the universities, which long retained their medieval character, but rather in the academies and the learned societies, in the Jesuit colleges and the english public schools. Today this tradition has lost its intellectual supremacy and its social prestige, but it still lives in the cultures it created, for all the modern vernacular literatures, from shakespeare and Milton to Goethe and hölderlin, are its children. But at the present time the importance of the italian renaissance and the value of the humanist culture are less regarded than they have been for more than four hundred years. it would be difficult to find anyone today who would agree with Voltaire’s judgment that the age of Pope Leo X was one of those rare moments in the life of humanity which “vindicate the greatness of the human spirit and compensate the historian for the barren prospect of a thousand years of stupidity and barbarism.” nevertheless the italian renaissance marks a turning point in history, due to a change in the axis of Western culture, which no historian can afford to ignore. The focus of medieval Christendom was to be found in the north, in the territories between the rhine and the Loire, which was the source of almost all the characteristic achievements of the Middle ages. This was the center of the Carolingian empire and the french monarchy and the feudal society. it was the source of the great movements of monastic and ecclesiastical reform, and of the Crusading movement. it was the cradle of Gothic architecture and of the medieval schools of scholastic philosophy. 21 22 The Crisis of Western Education But in the later Middle ages a new kind of society was growing up in italy and the Mediterranean which was radically different from the feudal-ecclesiastical society of the north. it was a society of cities and city states in which the political conception of citizenship took the place of the feudal relation of personal allegiance and loyalty, so that it tended to reproduce the old patterns of classical Mediterranean city culture. as the unity of medieval Christendom became weaker and the old northern center of medieval culture declined, the revival of Mediterranean culture grew in strength and became increasingly conscious of its independent origins and of the great traditions of the past. This consciousness was increased by the fact that the italian cities had become the dominant power in the eastern Mediterranean and were thus brought into immediate contact with the older traditions of the Byzantine empire and of Greek culture. Venice and Genoa were the rulers of the aegean and the ionian seas, a florentine dynasty reigned at athens and the Byzantine emperors themselves were being forced by the Turkish peril to lay aside their hostility to the Latins and look to Venice and the Papacy for help. Thus at the very moment when, as i mentioned in the last chapter, the final breach occurred between the Papacy and the Conciliar movement , which had been led by the university of Paris, a rapprochement was taking place between rome and Constantinople which led to the reunion of the eastern and Western Churches at the Council of florence in 1439. it is true that the union failed to gain popular support in the east and consequently failed to save the Byzantine empire. But nevertheless it produced a rapprochement between the leading minds of the new italian culture and the last representatives of Byzantine hellenism . for Greek culture in the last days of the Byzantine empire was not so decadent as one might have expected from its political decline. There were even signs of a cultural revival which was inspired by hellenic rather than Byzantine traditions. But conditions in the east were unfavorable to its development, and the outlying provinces of the Byzantine world, such as russia, were far too backward to carry on the traditions of Greek culture. Consequently it was in italy and not in the east that the soil was The Age of Humanism 23 ripe to receive the seeds of hellenism. The italian cities resembled the city states of ancient Greece in the intensity of their political life, the activity of...