The History Of Education, Ellwood P. Cubberley [motivational novels .TXT] 📗

THE REVIVAL OF LEARNING

THE PERIOD OF CHANGE. The thirteenth century has often been called the wonderful century of the mediaeval world. It was wonderful largely in that the forces struggling against mediaevalism to evolve the modern spirit here first find clear expression. It was a century of rapid and unmistakable progress in almost every line. By its close great changes were under way which were destined ultimately to shake off the incubus of mediaevalism and to transform Europe. In many respects, though, the fourteenth was a still more wonderful century.

The evolution of the universities which we have just traced was one of the most important of these thirteenth-century manifestations. Lacking in intellectual material, but impelled by the new impulses beginning to work in the world, the scholars of the time went earnestly to work, by speculative methods, to organize the dogmatic theology of the Church into a system of thinking. The result was Scholasticism. From one point of view the result was barren; from another it was full of promise for the future.

Though the workers lacked materials, were overshadowed by the mediaeval spirit of authority, and kept their efforts clearly within limits approved by the Church, the “heroic industry” and the “in tense application”

displayed in effecting the organization, and the logical subtlety developed in discussing the results, promised much for the future. The rise of university instruction, and the work of the Scholastics in organizing the knowledge of the time, were both a resultant of new influences already at work and a prediction of larger consequences to follow. In a later age, and with men more emancipated from church control, the same spirit was destined to burst forth in an effort to discover and reconstruct the historic past.

During the thirteenth century, too, the new Estate, which had come into existence alongside of the clergy and the nobility, began to assume large importance. The arts-and-crafts guilds were attaining a large development, and out of this new burgher class the great general public of modern times has in time evolved. Trade and industry were increasing in all lands, and merchants and successful artisans were becoming influential through their newly obtained wealth and rights. The erection of stately churches and town halls, often beautifully carved and highly ornamented, was taking place. Great cathedrals, those “symphonies in stone,” of which Notre Dame (Figure 53) is a good example, were rising or being further expanded and decorated at many places in western Europe. Mystery and miracle plays had begun to be performed and to attract great attention. In the fourteenth century religious pageants were added. “All art was still religion,” but an art was unmistakably arising amid cathedral-building and the setting-forth of the Christian mysteries, and before long this was to flower in modern forms of expression in painting, sculpture, and the drama.

THE NEW SPIRIT OF NATIONALITY. The new spirit moving in western Europe also found expression in the evolution of the modern European States, based on the new national feeling. As the kingly power in these was consolidated, the developing States, each in its own domain, began to curb the dominion of the universal Church, slowly to deprive it of the governmental functions it had assumed and exercised for so long, and to confine the Pope and clergy more and more to their original functions as religious agents. The Papacy as a temporal power passed the maximum period of its greatness early in the thirteenth century; in the nineteenth century the last vestiges of its temporal power were taken away.

New national languages also were coming into being, and the national epics of the people—the Cid, the Arthurian Legends, the Chansons, and the Nibelungen Lied—were reduced to writing. With the introduction from the East, toward the close of the thirteenth century, of the process of making paper for writing, and with the increase of books in the vernacular, the English, French, Spanish, Italian, and German languages rapidly took shape. Their development was expressive of the new spirit in western Europe, as also was the fact that Dante (1264-1321), “the first literary layman since Boethius” (d. 524), wrote his great poem, The Divine Comedy, in his native Italian instead of in the Latin which he knew so well—an evidence of independence of large future import. New native literatures were springing forth all over Europe. Beginning with the troubadours in southern France (p. 186), and taken up by the trouv�res

in northern France and by the minnesingers in German lands, the new poetry of nature and love and joy of living had spread everywhere. [1] A new race of men was beginning to “sing songs as blithesome and gay as the birds” and to express in these songs the joys of the world here below.

TRANSFORMATION OF THE MEDIAEVAL MAN. The fourteenth century was a period of still more rapid change and transformation. New objects of interest were coming to the front, and new standards of judgment were being applied. National spirit and a national patriotism were finding expression. The mediaeval man, with his feeling of personal insignificance, lack of self-confidence, “no sense of the past behind him, and no conception of the possibilities of the future before him,” [2] was rapidly giving way to the man possessed of the modern spirit—the man of self-confidence, conscious of his powers, enjoying life, feeling his connection with the historic past, and realizing the potentialities of accomplishment in the world here below. It was the great work of the period of transition, and especially of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, to effect this change, “to awaken in man a consciousness of his powers, to give him confidence in himself, to show him the beauty of the world and the joy of life, and to make him feel his living connection with the past and the greatness of the future he might create.” [3] As soon as men began clearly to experience such feelings, they began to inquire, and inquiry led to the realization that there had been a great historic past of which they knew but little, and of which they wanted to know much. When this point had been reached, western Europe was ready for a revival of learning.

THE BEGINNINGS IN ITALY. This revival began in Italy. The Italians had preserved more of the old Roman culture than had any other people, and had been the first to develop a new political and social order and revive the refinements of life after the deluge of barbarism which had engulfed Europe. They, too, had been the first to feel the inadequacy of mediaeval learning to satisfy the intellectual unrest of men conscious of new standards of life. This gave them at least a century of advance over the nations of northern Europe. The old Roman life also was nearer to them, and meant more, so that a movement for a revival of interest in it attracted to it the finest young minds of central and northern Italy and inspired in them something closely akin to patriotic fervor. They felt themselves the direct heirs of the political and intellectual eminence of Imperial Rome, and they began the work of restoring to themselves and of trying to understand their inheritance.

[Illustration: FIG. 68. PETRARCH (1304-74) “The Morning Star of the Renaissance”]

In Petrarch (1304-74) we have the beginnings of the movement. He has been called “the first modern scholar and man of letters.” Repudiating the other-worldliness ideal and the scholastic learning of his time, [4]

possessed of a deep love for beauty in nature and art, a delight in travel, a desire for worldly fame, a strong historical sense, and the self-confidence to plan a great constructive work, he began the task of unearthing the monastic treasures to ascertain what the past had been and known and done. At twenty-nine he made his first great discovery, at Li�ge, in the form of two previously unknown orations of Cicero. Twelve years later, at Verona, he found half of one of the letters of Cicero which had been lost for ages. All his life he collected and copied manuscripts. His letter to a friend telling him of his difficulty in getting a work of Cicero copied, and his joy in doing the work himself (R.

125), is typical of his labors. He began the work of copying and comparing the old classical manuscripts, and from them reconstructing the past. He also wrote many sonnets, ballads, lyrics, and letters, all filled with a new modern classical spirit. He also constructed the first modern map of Italy.

[Illustration: FIG. 69. BOCCACCIO (1313-75) “The Father of Italian Prose”]

Through Boccaccio, whom he first met in 1350, Petrarch’s work was made known