Durant W. The Renaissance. A History of Civilization in Italy from 1304-1576 A.D
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celestial influences. This is true also of Christianity; at the
present moment, says Pomponazzi, there are signs that Christianity
is dying. `051950 He adds that as a Christian he rejects all this as
nonsense.
His final book, De fato, seems more orthodox, for it is a
defense of free will. He admits its incompatibility with divine
foreknowledge and omniscience, but stands on his consciousness of free
activity, and on the necessity of assuming some freedom of choice if
there is to be any moral responsibility in man. In his treatise on
immortality he had faced the question whether a moral code could
succeed without supernatural punishments and rewards. He held, with
stoic pride, that the sufficient reward of virtue is virtue itself,
not any post-mortem paradise; `051951 but he confessed that most men
can be induced to decency only by supernatural hopes and fears. Hence,
he explained, great legislators have taught the belief in a future
state as an economical substitute for ubiquitous police; and, like
Plato, he justifies the inculcation of fables and myths if these can
help to control the natural wickedness of men. `051952
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Therefore they have posited, for the virtuous, eternal reward in
another life, but, for the sinful, eternal punishments, which frighten
them very greatly. And the greater part of men, if they do good, do it
more from fear of eternal punishment than hope of eternal good,
since the punishments are more known to us than those eternal goods.
And since this last device can benefit all men, of whatever class they
are, the legislator, seeing the proneness of men to evil, and
intending the common good, has decreed that the soul is immortal,
not caring for truth but only for righteousness, so that he may
bring men to virtue. `051952a
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Most men, he thinks, are so simple mentally and so brutish morally
that they must be treated as children or invalids. It is not wise to
teach them the doctrines of philosophy. "These things," he says of his
own speculations, "are not to be communicated to common people, for
they are incapable of receiving these secrets. We must beware even
of holding discourse concerning them with ignorant priests." `051953
He divides mankind into philosophers and religious persons, and
innocently believes that "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." `051954
In humbler moments he realized the narrow limits of human reason,
and the honorable futility of metaphysics. He pictured himself in
his later years as worn and haggard with thought about it and about,
and likened the philosopher to Prometheus, who, because he wished to
steal fire from heaven- i.e., snatch at divine knowledge- was
condemned to be bound to a rock and to have his heart gnawed at by a
vulture endlessly. `051955 "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." `051956
The controversies in which he engaged wore him down and helped to
ruin his health. He suffered from one illness after another, until
finally he determined to die. He chose a hard form of suicide: he
starved himself to death. Resisting every argument and every threat,
and triumphing even over force, he refused either to eat or to
speak. After seven days of this regimen he felt that he had won his
battle for the right to die, and might now safely speak. "I depart
gladly," he said. Some one asked him, "Where are you going?" "Where
all mortals go," he answered. His friends made a final effort to
persuade him to eat, but he preferred to die (1525). `051957
Cardinal Gonzaga, who had been his pupil, had the remains
transported to Mantua and buried there, and, with typical
Renaissance tolerance, raised a statue to his memory.
Pomponazzi had put into philosophic form a skepticism that had for
two centuries been attacking the foundations of Christian belief.
The failure of the Crusades; the influx of Moslem ideas through
Crusades, trade, and Arab philosophy; the removal of the papacy to
Avignon and its ridiculous division in the Schism; the revelation of a
pagan Greco-Roman world full of wise men and great art and yet without
the Bible or the Church; the spread of education, and its increasing
escape from ecclesiastical control; the immorality and worldliness
of the clergy, even of popes, suggesting their private disbelief in
the publicly professed creed; their use of the idea of purgatory to
raise funds for their purposes; the reaction of the rising
mercantile and moneyed classes against ecclesiastical domination;
the transformation of the Church from a religious organization into
a secular political power: all these factors, and many more,
combined to make the Italian middle and upper classes, in the late
fifteenth and early sixteenth century, "the most skeptical of European
peoples." `051958
It is clear from the poetry of Politian and Pulci, and the
philosophy of Ficino, that the circle of Lorenzo had no actual
belief in another life; and the sentiment of Ferrara appears in the
fun that Ariosto makes of the inferno that to Dante had seemed so
frightfully real. Almost half the literature of the Renaissance is
anticlerical. Many of the condottieri were open atheists; `051959
the cortigiani or courtiers were far less religious than the
cortigiane or courtesans; and a polite skepticism was the mark and
requisite of a gentleman. `051960 Petrarch lamented the fact that in
the minds of many scholars it was a sign of ignorance to prefer the
Christian religion to pagan philosophy. `051961 In Venice, 1530, it
was found that most of the upper ranks neglected their Easter duty-
i.e., did not go to confession and communion even once a year. `051962
Luther claimed to have found a saying current among the educated
classes in Italy on going to Mass: "Come, let us conform to the
popular error." `051963
As to the universities, a curious incident reveals the temper of
professors and students. Shortly after Pomponazzi's death his pupil
Simone Porzio, invited to lecture at Pisa, chose as his text
Aristotle's Meteorology. The audience did not like the subject.
Several cried out impatiently: Quid de anima? - "What about the
soul?" Porzio had to set the Meteorology aside and take up
Aristotle's De anima; at once the audience was all
attention. `051964 We do not know whether in that lecture Porzio
expressed his belief that the human soul differs in no essential point
from the soul of a lion or a plant; we do know that he so taught in
his book De mente humana- On the Human Mind; `051965 and he seems to
have escaped unharmed. Eugenio Tarralba, indicted by the Spanish
Inquisition in 1528, related that as a youth he had studied in Rome
under three teachers, all of whom taught that the soul was
mortal. `051966 Erasmus was astonished to find that at Rome the
fundamentals of the Christian faith were topics of skeptical
discussion among the cardinals. One ecclesiastic undertook to
explain to him the absurdity of belief in a future life; others smiled
at Christ and the Apostles; many, he assures us, claimed to have heard
papal functionaries blaspheming the Mass. `051967 The lower classes
kept their faith, as we shall see; the thousands who heard
Savonarola must have believed; and the example of Vittoria Colonna
shows that piety could survive education. 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.
V. GUICCIARDINI
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The mind of Guicciardini summarizes the skeptical disillusionment of
the times. It was one of the sharpest minds of the age; too cynical
for our taste, too pessimistic for our hopes, but penetrating as a
roving searchlight in the skies, and candid with the frankness of a
writer who has wisely resolved on solely posthumous publication.
Francesco Guicciardini had the initial advantage of aristocratic
birth. From his childhood he heard educated conversation in good
Italian, and learned to accept life with the realism and grace of a
man confident of his footing. His great-uncle was several times
gonfalonier of the republic; his grandfather held in turn most of
the principal offices in the government; his father knew Latin and
Greek, and filled several diplomatic posts; "my godfather," wrote
Francesco, "was Messer Marsilio Ficino, the greatest Platonic
philosopher then in the world"- `051968 which did not prevent the
historian from becoming an Aristotelian. He studied civil law, and
at the age of twenty-three was appointed professor of law at Florence.
He traveled widely, even to noting "the fantastic and bizarre
inventions" of Hieronymus Bosch in Flanders. `051969 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." `051970
Nevertheless he had a passion for excellence, and the
self-discipline to create works of literary art. His Storia
Fiorentina, written at twenty-seven, is one of the most surprising
products of an age when genius, swollen with its recovered heritage
but loosened from tradition, flowed full and free in a dozen
streams. The book limited itself to a short segment of Florentine
history, from 1378 to 1509; but it treated that period with an
accuracy of detail, a critical examination of sources, a penetrating
analysis of causes, a maturity and impartiality of judgment, a command
of vivid narrative in fine Italian, that were not matched by the
Storie Fiorentine that Machiavelli wrote eleven years later in the
sixth decade of his life.
In 1512, still a youth of thirty, Guicciardini was sent as
ambassador to Ferdinand the Catholic. In quick succession Leo X and
Clement VII made him governor of Reggio Emilia, Modena, and Parma,
then governor general of all the Romagna, then lieutenant general of
all papal troops. In 1534 he returned to Florence, and supported
Alessandro de' Medici throughout that scoundrel's quinquennium of
tyranny. In 1537 he was the chief agent in promoting the accession
of Cosimo the Younger to be Duke of Florence. When his hopes of
dominating Cosimo faded, Guicciardini retired to a rural villa to
write in one year the ten volumes of his masterpiece, the Storia
d'Italia.
It is inferior to his earlier work in freshness and vigor of
style; Guicciardini had meanwhile studied the humanists, and slipped
into formality and rhetoric; even so it is a stately style,
presaging Gibbon's monumental prose. The subtitle, History of the
Wars, limits the subject to matters military and political; at the
same time the field is widened to all Italy, and to all Europe as
related to Italy; this is the first history to view the European
political system as a connected whole. Guicciardini writes of what for
the most part he knew at first hand, and, toward the end, of events in
which he had played a part. He collected documents sedulously, and
is far more accurate and reliable than Machiavelli. if, like his
more famous contemporary, he returns to the ancient custom of
inventing speeches for the persons of his tale, he frankly states that
they are true only in substance; some he specifies as authentic; and
all are used effectively to state both sides of a debate, or to reveal
the policies and diplomacy of the European states. Taken together,
this massive history, and the brilliant Storia Fiorentina,
constitute Guicciardini as the greatest historian of the sixteenth
century. As Napoleon was anxious to see Goethe, so Charles V, at
Bologna, kept lords and generals waiting in an anteroom while he
conversed at length with Guicciardini. "I can create a hundred
nobles in an hour," he said, "but I cannot produce such an historian
in twenty years." `051971
As a man of the world he did not take too seriously the efforts of
philosophers to diagnose the universe. He must have smiled at the
excitement aroused by Pomponazzi, if he noticed it. Since the
supernatural is beyond our ken, he considered it useless to war over
rival philosophies. Doubtless all religions are based upon assumptions
and myths, but these are forgivable if they help to maintain social
order and moral discipline. For man, in Guicciardini's view, is by
nature self-seeking, immoral, lawless; he has to be checked at every
turn by custom, morals, law, or force; and religion is usually the
least disagreeable means to these ends. 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. Guicciardini writes, in his secret record:
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To no man is it more displeasing than to me to see the ambition,
covetousness, and excesses of priests, not only because all wickedness
is hateful in itself, but because... such wickedness should find no
place in men whose state of Life implies a special relationship to
God.... My relations with several popes have made me desire their
greatness at the expense of my own interest. Had it not been for
this consideration, I would have loved Martin Luther as myself; not
that I might set myself free from the laws imposed upon us by
Christianity... but that I might see this swarm of scoundrels ( questa
caterva di scelerati ) confined within due limits, so that they
might be forced to choose between a life without crime or a life
without power. `051972
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Nevertheless his own morality was hardly superior to that of the
priests. His personal code was to adjust himself to whatever powers
were at the moment supreme; his general principles he kept for his
books. There, too, he could be as cynical as Machiavelli:
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Sincerity pleases and wins praise, dissimulation is censured and
hated; the former, however, is more useful to others than to
oneself. Therefore I should praise him whose usual mode of life was
open and sincere, and who only used dissimulation in certain things of
great importance; it then succeeds all the better, the more one has
contrived to establish a reputation for sincerity. `051973
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He saw through the shibboleths of the various political parties in
Florence; each group, though it shouted for liberty, wanted power.
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It seems clear to me that the desire of dominating one's fellows and
asserting superiority is natural to man, so that there are few so in
love with liberty that they would not seize a favorable opportunity of
ruling and lording it. Look closely at the behavior of the
indwellers of the selfsame city; mark and examine their dissensions,
and you shall find that the object is preponderance rather than
freedom. Those, then, who are the foremost citizens do not strive
after liberty, though that be in their mouths; but the increase of
their own sway and preeminence is really in their hearts. Liberty is a
cant term with them, and disguises their lust of superiority in
power and honor. `051974
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He despised the Soderini merchant republic, accustomed to defend its
liberties with gold instead of arms. And he had no faith in the people
or democracy:
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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. `051975
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Guicciardini was one of thousands in Renaissance Italy who had no
faith whatever; who had lost the Christian idyl, had learned the
emptiness of politics, expected no utopia, dreamed no dreams; and
who sat back helpless while a world of war and barbarism swept over
Italy; somber old men, emancipated in mind and broken in hope, who had
discovered, too late, that when the myth dies only force is free.
VI. MACHIAVELLI
1. The Diplomat
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One man remains, hard to classify: diplomat, historian, dramatist,
philosopher; the most cynical thinker of his time, and yet a patriot
fired with a noble ideal; a man who failed in everything that he
undertook, but left upon history a deeper mark than almost any other
figure of the age.
Niccolo Machiavelli was the son of a Florentine lawyer- a man of
moderate means, who held a minor post in the government, and owned a
small rural villa at San Casciano ten miles out of the city. The boy
received the ordinary literary education; learned to read Latin
readily, but no Greek. He took a fancy to Roman history, became
enamored of Livy, and found for almost every political institution and
event of his day an illuminating analogue in the history of Rome. He
began, but seems never to have completed, the study of law. He cared
little for the art of the Renaissance, and expressed no interest in
the discovery of America; perhaps he felt that merely the theater of
politics was now enlarged, while the plot and characters would
remain unchanged. His one absorbing interest was politics, the
technique of influence, the chess of power. In 1498, aged twenty-nine,
he was appointed secretary to the Dieci della Guerra- a Council of Ten
for War- and held that post for fourteen years.
It was at first a modest function- compiling minutes and records,
summarizing reports, writing letters; but he was in government, he
could watch the politics of Europe from an inside observation point,
he could try to forecast developments by applying his knowledge of
history. His eager, nervous, ambitious spirit felt that only time
was needed before he would be at the top, playing the heady game of
state against the duke of Milan, the Senate of Venice, the king of
France, the king of Naples, the pope, the emperor. Soon he was sent on
a mission to Caterina Sforza, Countess of Imola and Forli (1498).
She proved too subtle for him, and he came back empty-handed,
chastened. Two years later he was tried again, accompanied Francesco
della Casa as associate envoy to Louis XII of France; della Casa
fell ill, and Machiavelli had to head the mission; he learned
French, followed the court from chateau to chateau, and transmitted to
the Signory such alert intelligence, such keen analyses, that on his
return to Florence his friends acclaimed him as now a graduate
diplomat.
The turning point in his intellectual development was his mission,
as aide to Bishop Soderini, to Caesar Borgia at Urbino (1502).
Called back to Florence for a personal report, he celebrated his
rise in the world by taking a wife. In October he was again despatched
to Caesar. He joined him at Imola, and arrived at Senigallia just in
time to note Borgia's happiness at having successfully ensnared, and
strangled or caged, the men who had conspired against him. These
were events that stirred all Italy; to Machiavelli, meeting the
brilliant ogre in the flesh, they were lessons in philosophy. 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! From that moment Caesar
Borgia became the hero of Machiavelli's philosophy, as Bismarck
would be of Nietzsche's; here, in this embodied will to power, was a
morality beyond good and evil, a model for supermen.
Back in Florence (1503), Machiavelli perceived that some members
of the government suspected him of having been swept off his mental
feet by the dashing Borgia. But his industrious scheming to advance
the interests of his city regained for him the esteem of the
Gonfalonier Soderini and the Council of Ten for War. In 1507 he saw
the triumph of one of his basic ideas. No self-respecting state, he
had long argued, could entrust its defense to mercenary troops; they
could not be relied upon in a crisis; and they or their leader could
almost always be bought by an enemy armed with sufficient gold. A
national militia should be formed, said Machiavelli, composed of
citizens, preferably of vigorous peasants used to hardship and the
open air; it should be kept always in good equipment and training; and
it should serve as the last firm line of the republic's defense. After
long hesitation the government accepted the plan, and empowered
Machiavelli to realize it in action. In 1508 he led his new
milizia to the siege of Pisa, where it acquitted itself well; Pisa
surrendered, and Machiavelli returned to Florence at the height of his
arc.
On a second mission to France (1510) he passed through
Switzerland; his enthusiasm was aroused by the armed independence of
the Swiss Confederation, and he made it his ideal for Italy. Returning
from France, he saw the problem of his country: how could its separate
principalities unite to protect Italy if a united nation like France
should decide to absorb the whole peninsula?
The supreme test of his militia came too soon. In 1512 Julius II,
furious against Florence for having refused to join in expelling the
French from Italy, ordered the armies of the Holy League to suppress
the republic and restore the Medici; and Machiavelli's militia,
assigned to defend the Florentine line at Prato, broke and fled before
the trained mercenaries of the League. Florence was taken, the
Medici triumphed; Machiavelli lost both his reputation and his
governmental post. He made every effort to appease the victors, and
might have succeeded; but two ardent youths, conspiring to
re-establish the republic, were detected; among their papers was found
a list of persons on whose support they had counted; it included
Machiavelli. He was arrested and tortured with four turns of the rack;
but no evidence of his complicity having been found, he was
released. Fearing rearrest, he removed with his wife and four children
to the ancestral villa at San Casciano. There he spent all but the
last of his remaining fifteen years, fretting in hopeful poverty.
But for this disaster we should never have heard of him, for it was in
those hungry years that he wrote books that moved the world.
2. The Author and the Man
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