We cannot, on the other hand, read without a kind of awe how men sometimes boasted of their fortune in public inscriptions.Giovanni IIBentivoglio, ruler of Bologna, ventured to carve in stone on the newly built tower by his palace that his merit and his fortune had given him richly of all that could be desired--and this a few years before his expulsion.The ancients, when they spoke in this tone, had nevertheless a sense of the envy of the gods.In Italy it was probably the Condottieri who first ventured to boast so loudly of their fortune.But the way in which resuscitated antiquity affected religion most powerfully, was not through any doctrines or philosophical system, but through a general tendency which it fostered.The men, and in some respects the institutions, of antiquity were preferred to those of the Middle Ages, and in the eager attempt to imitate and reproduce them, religion was left to take care of itself.All was absorbed in the admiration for historical greatness.To this the philologians added many special follies of their own, by which they became the mark for general attention.How far Paul II was justified in calling his Abbreviators and their friends to account for their paganism, is certainly a matter of great doubt, as his biographer and chief victim, Platina, has shown a masterly skill in explaining his vindictiveness on other grounds, and especially in making him play a ludicrous figure.
The charges of infidelity, paganism, denial of immortality, and so forth, were not made against the accused till the charge of high treason had broken down.Paul, indeed, if we are correctly informed about him, was by no means the man to judge of intellectual things.It was he who exhorted the Romans to teach their children nothing beyond reading and writing.His priestly narrowness of views reminds us of Savonarola, with the difference that Paul might fairly have been told that he and his like were in great part to blame if culture made men hostile to religion.It cannot, nevertheless, be doubted that he felt a real anxiety about the pagan tendencies which surrounded him.And what, in truth, may not the humanists have allowed themselves at the court of the profligate pagan, Sigismondo Malatesta, How far these men, destitute for the most part of fixed principle, ventured to go, depended assuredly on the sort of influences they were exposed to.Nor could they treat of Christianity without paganizing it.It is curious, for instance, to notice how far Gioviano Pontano carried this confusion.He speaks of a saint not only as 'divus,' but as 'deus'; the angels he holds to be identical with the genii of antiquity; and his notion of immortality reminds us of the old kingdom of the shades.This spirit occasionally appears in the most extravagant shapes.In 1526, when Siena was attacked by the exiled party, the worthy Canon Tizio, who tells us the story himself, rose from his bed on the 22nd of July, called to mind what is written in the third book of Macrobius, celebrated Mass, and then pronounced against the enemy the curse with which his author had supplied him, only altering 'Tellus mater teque Jupiter obtestor' into 'Tellus teque Christe Deus obtestor.' After he had done this for three days, the enemy retreated.On the one side, these things strike us as an affair of mere style and fashion j on the other, as a symptom of religious decadence.
Influence of Ancient Superstition But in another way, and that dogmatically, antiquity exercised perilous influence.It imparted to the Renaissance its own forms of superstition.Some fragments of this had survived in Italy all through the Middle Ages, and the resuscitation of the whole was thereby made so much the more easy.The part played by the imagination in the process need not be dwelt upon.This only could have silenced the critical intellect of the Italians.
The belief in a Divine government of the world was in many minds destroyed by the spectacle of so much injustice and misery.Others, like Dante, surrendered at all events this life to the caprices of chance, and if they nevertheless retained a sturdy faith, it was because they held that the higher destiny of man would be accomplished in the life to come.But when the belief in immortality began to waver, then Fatalism got the upper hand, or sometimes the latter came first and had the former as its consequence.
The gap thus opened was in the first place filled by the astrology of antiquity, or even of the Arabs.From the relation of the planets among themselves and to the signs of the zodiac.future events and the course of whole lives were inferred, and the most weighty decisions were taken in consequence.In many cases the line of action thus adopted at the suggestion of the stars may not have been more immoral than that which would otherwise have been followed.But too often the decision must have been made at the cost of honour and conscience.It is profoundly instructive to observe how powerless culture and enlightenment were against this delusion; since the latter had its support in the ardent imagination of the people, in the passionate wish to penetrate and determine the future.Antiquity, too, was on the side of astrology.
