The Forgotten Renaissance

__"The Other Face of the Renaissance" by Jaroslav Pelikan, in The Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (Apr. 1997), Norton’s Woods, 136 Irving St., Cambridge, Mass. 02138.__

In The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), his famous book about Italian life from the mid-14th to the mid-16th centuries, Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt vividly described the rise of humanism and worship of the classical past as medieval Christendom declined. Under his spell, many later scholars came to see the Renaissance as a sort of prelude to the Enlightenment. "Humanism" was often equated with the rejection of traditional religious beliefs. But this interpretation is misleading, contends Pelikan, a professor of history emeritus at Yale University.

While Burckhardt wrote of "the revival of antiquity," the truth is, Pelikan notes, that "neither Hellenic nor Latin culture could be confined to their Classical, pagan expressions." The humanists of the 15th and 16th centuries, he says, devoted their scholarly labors not only to the works of Plato and Homer but to the Bible and the writings of the early church fathers.

For a millennium after the death of Augustine in a.d. 430, "ignorance of Greek had been a chronic disease in the intellectual life of Western Europe," Pelikan points out. Yet, thanks in part to the conquests of Alexander the Great (356–23 b.c.), Greek had become a world language. Alexandrian Jews had translat-ed the Old Testament into Greek, and it was not the Hebrew Bible in the original but their "Septuagint translation" (the miraculous work, according to legend, of 70 translators who, working independently, each achieved the same result) that most of the New Testament writers, including Saint Paul, had known. The Greek church fathers had also produced a vast body of literature. With the recovery of Greek during the Renaissance, much of this literature became accessible in the West for the first time.

Though Latin had not been "lost" in the way that Greek was, it had a similar, and even more extensive, "afterlife," Pelikan says, in the Vulgate (Saint Jerome’s Latin translation of the Bible made at the end of the fourth century), in the Mass, and in the corpus of literature produced by the Latin church fathers, which was even larger than that of their Greek counterparts. The Renaissance humanists looked for inspiration to these "sacred" texts, as well as the ancient non-Christian ones, giving them "the same editorial care and typographical embellishment," Pelikan writes. Nineteen editions of Augustine’s City of God, for instance, were made before 1500.

The "crowning achievements of sacred philology" during the Renaissance were the many Bibles produced, Pelikan writes. There had been numerous efforts during the Middle Ages to rid the Latin Vulgate translation of corruptions. But the proliferation of printed Bibles in the late 15th and early 16th centuries gave "the Renaissance enterprise of textual criticism ...a new impetus." Robert Estienne’s superb edition of the Vulgate, the Biblia in two parts, first appeared at Paris during 1527–28. Estienne’s Greek Bible, Novum Testamentum Graece, of 1550, "formed the basis of the Greek textus receptus for, among other translations, the Authorized (‘King James’) Version of the English Bible," Pelikan says. The Renaissance and the Reformation, it seems, had much more in common than many have supposed.