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CHAPTER VIII.

RENAISSANCE AND REFORMATION.

MANY books have been written on the various phases of the Renaissance, its philosophy, its art, as well as its political history. Never has there been seen a more extraordinary efflorescence of all the higher intellectual activities than when, first in Italy, then in France, then in England and Germany, the world of ideas, and feelings and active life became completely renewed. Then was the day of all round men of genius, especially in Italy; men like Alberti, Leonardo da Vinci, Michael Angelo, in whom painting and architecture and literature and music found equal and harmonious expression. If ever there was a period of the Superman it was in the Italy of the Renaissance.

But, somewhat strangely, as it might seem, at first sight, these same men were likewise filled with the transcendental spirit, and we have already seen how Neo-Platonism had inspired the Italian Humanists with its spiritual aspiration after abstract beauty, and how men like Michael Angelo could carve out a David, build the dome of St. Peter's and at the same time be filled with the mystic spirit of the "Symposium." Yet in general the transcendentalism of Italy was not strictly religious, and the Humanists as a body were often men of immoral and irreligious life, the principles of most of them being summed up in the words of Campanella, "Foris ut licet, intus ut libet." The religious mysticism of the Renaissance is most closely connected with Germany, where the same forces that had produced Humanism in Italy, brought on the Reformation.

While in general there is a community of causes and effects in both these countries, yet there is a very definite distinction as to the form they took. In Italy it was a love for

beauty, as seen in the art and literature of the ancient classics, together with a joy in life, an eager intellectual curiosity, a restless activity, showing itself in voyages of discovery, in the building of countless public and private edifices, in magnificent palaces, gorgeous costumes, processions, feasts and dramatic representations. The Italians of the Renaissance had not only discovered the supreme art of Greece and Rome, but also the beauty of the world in which they lived. Beauty was the goddess whom they worshipped, beauty of man and woman, beauty of nature, and above all else, abstract beauty itself. This led to a new view of nature, both from an aesthetic and a scientific standpoint. Petrarch loved to say his prayers on the moonlit hills, and ascended, the first man in history to do such a thing, a high mountain, simply for the sake of enjoying the view; while men like Bruno, Cardano and Galileo, laid the foundations of the new sciences to come.

Something of this was seen in Germany, but in general the Germans sought more to

penetrate the mysterious recesses of their own. hearts; and the influence of Eckhart, Tauler and the "Theologia Germanica" mingled with the streams of influence which came from Italy.

The transcendental sense is a vague and evanescent thing. It comes to some men more than to others, and it comes to the same man more at one time than at another. And the same thing is true of humanity itself. The transcendental feeling is more natural to some races than to others, and to the same nation at different periods of its history.

It is probable that this mystical impulse never found a wider-spread, more profound cultivation in all its phases than in the Germany of the Reformation. The medieval mystics had sought God alone in the inward contemplation, and for centuries their thought had been that of Coleridge,—

I may not hope from outward forms to win. The passion and the life, whose sources are within.

But now a change took place. Influenced by the practical aspect of the teachings of Eckhart and his followers, as well as by the new study of nature started in Italy, men no longer sought to see God in contemplation alone, but in nature as well. Science itself became mystical. It was full of superstitions, depended on imagination rather than on observation and experiment. Yet it sought to know nature and to connect it with the divine. It was a strange and mysterious world, however, into which these men strove to penetrate, a world far different from that which modern science has shown us, with its exact mathematical laws, with no mystery, and only to be understood by patient industry, by logical conclusions, by accurate experiments, and above all by the rigid exclusion of mere fancy and imagination.

In the sixteenth century imagination took the place of observation and experiment, in the case of most men. Nevertheless we perceive a vast advance in these things over the Middle Ages, and a Copernicus and a Kepler

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