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The superiority of Humanism, then, lies in this, that it does not discourage human enterprise by assuming that the real is completely rigid and eternally achieved without regard to human effort. In the drama that unrolls reality, every man, it teaches, has a duty and a power to play his humble but essential part.
Originality gradually gave place to conventionality, until men actually came to prefer the absurdities of Ciceronianism, and a cold, colorless adherence to hard-and-fast rules of composition, to a work throbbing with the pulsation of virile life. Humanism was beginning to take flight from Italy, to find a home and a welcome beyond the Alps.
The theological colleges of the Dominicans and Franciscans at Paris were declining; theological teaching was taken over by the secular colleges of Navarre and Sorbonne, but in the old style. The general traditionalism had not prevented humanism from penetrating Paris also during the last quarter of the fifteenth century.
Over against this depersonalization, we must find some way to return to expressing the religious view and utilizing the religious power of the human spirit. We ventured to say in the preceding chapter that, under the influences of more than three centuries of humanism, the spiritual solidarity of mankind is breaking down.
In some cases the humanists openly attacked the teachings of the Church, but generally they remained outwardly loyal to it and many of them even found positions among the officers of the papal curia. Humanism produced a revolution in the idea of a liberal education.
"A punishment which I endured calmly, Herr Professor," interrupted Lienhard Groland, "for I myself was that 'rebellious youth. Besides, it was by no means the teachings of humanism which led me to an act that you, learned sir, doubtless regard with sterner eyes than the Christian charity which your clerical garb made me expect would permit."
Even such community of feeling as one spoken language gives, was lacking. And yet Italy distinguished herself clearly from the rest of Europe, not merely as a geographical fact, but also as a people intellectually and spiritually one. The rapid rise of humanism had aided in producing this national self-consciousness.
Andrea Mongaio of Belluno lived long at Damascus for the purpose of studying Avicenna, learnt Arabic, and emended the author's text. The Venetian government afterwards appointed him professor of this subject at Padua. We must here linger for a moment over Pico della Mirandola, before passing on to the general effects of humanism.
Now there is a masterful aggressive humanism beginning to make itself felt, comparable in its spirit with the masterful venturing of the French explorers or the masterful faith of the French missionaries, that promises to constrain the city "to the saving and enhancing of individual and collective human power," even as the French missionaries tried to constrain the great fur- trading prospects of France to the saving of human souls.
If he never quite reaches in letters the famous passages of the Diary, describing the great Fire, and Whitehall on the eve of Charles the Second's mortal seizure, he sometimes comes near to this, and diffuses throughout a blend of humanism, and humanity, of science and art, which is very agreeable.
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