MODL 5304 Postings

“My two usual guiding lights are so hidden:

Reason and art so drowned by the waves,

That I begin to despair of finding harbor.”

From “The Voyage”

By Francesco Petrarca, (1304-1374 AD), more commonly called Petrarch

In this last stanza of the poem Petrarch mourns the elusiveness of “reason and art” which is paralleled by the appearance of “Scylla and Charybdis” in the first.  The sea monsters of Greek mythology not only reveal Petrarch’s dramatic feelings in the classical style of the danger of lost understanding, but also his attempt to integrate Greek literature into his own work.  Referred to as the “Father of Humanism”, Petrarch is often credited with creating the concept of the “Dark Ages” as a reference to those centuries after the decline of the Roman Empire and before the contemporary period.  One of the key distinctions that separate the “Dark Ages” from the classical and renaissance periods in Europe was the influence of the eastern part of the old
Roman Empire, the Greeks.  

In the article “The Origins of Humanism” Nicholas Mann outlines the emergence of humanist thought in the Middle Ages.  The climax of his article, that is the point at which he argues that “humanism may be said to have entered a new phase” (17) is when the Greek language reentered the circles of educated Europe allowing them access to all the philosophical, theological, scientific, and literary works of both the classical and modern Greeks.

Only a few centuries after the beginning of the first millennium the
Roman Empire was becoming more and more separated, not only administratively, but also religiously.  Although the official split in the Christian Church, which divided Catholic West from Orthodox East, did not occur until 1054 AD the divergence of the two cultures had occurred centuries earlier.  Greek thinkers with their wealth of knowledge and literary works were content to center themselves around
Constantinople and other major cities of the eastern empire. 

During the crusades the East-West divide was evident as easterners like Anna Comnena, princess of Byzantium during the First Crusade, commented on, what she considered, the uncouth and unreligious Westerners who were pouring through Byzantium into the
Middle East to shed blood in the name of Christ.  The fact that a woman was able and allowed to write such a history as Anna Comnena’s Alexiad helps to demonstrate the cultural difference of Latin West and Greek East. 

Once
Byzantium was overrun by the Turkish armies in the fourteenth century, expatriate Greek scholars helped to revive classical learning in the West which already had been rebirthing the ancient Latin texts in, what Nicholas Mann calls, the “centres of proto-humanism” (6).  Mann notes such humanists as Desiderius Erasmus, Leonardo Bruni, and Guarino of Verona who were influenced by the Byzantine diplomat Manuel Chrysoras. 

The focus in Mann’s article is Renaissance Italy and therefore Catholic humanist scholars are those mentioned, but the Protestant Reformation began not long after Greek and Latin studies penetrated the academic centers of
Europe.  One notable Protestant humanist was Philipp Melanchthon, a protégé of Martin Luther, who was a professor of Greek at Wittenberg and founded a number of classical schools across the Protestant kingdoms of
Germany.  Melanchthon not only drafted the first systematic outline of Protestant theology, but also translated the major doctrines of the Lutherans into Greek and sent it to the Patriarch of Constantinople.  Melanchthon hoped that some accommodations could be reached between the Eastern Church and the Western Protestants that might unite them religiously, if not also politically.  However, this was not to be.  East and West remained divided religiously and politically.    

I agree with Nicholas Mann’s focal argument that the entrance of Greek and the literature that came with it into
Europe propelled what might have solely been a renaissance of Latin into a more diverse and intellectually deeper movement.