Enlightenment Volume 1 by Peter Gay

Author:Peter Gay [Gay, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-83137-8
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2013-04-09T16:00:00+00:00

III

Looking back upon these centuries with their disrespectful, disenchanted eyes, the philosophes saw a time of great beginnings. It has often been said, and it is true, that the Enlightenment lacked the intimate knowledge of local history, the generous appreciation of philosophical speculation, and the full understanding of international politics, on which the recognition of the Renaissance depends—it would have been interesting to see Gibbon’s interpretation of Florence under the Medici, a history he planned but never wrote. Certainly the subtleties of nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholarship make the philosophes’ pronouncements on the Renaissance often appear ignorant or naïve.15 It is true, too, that the Enlightenment made no marked advance over Bayle’s vigorous restatement of the Humanists’ thesis that, beginning with Petrarch and ending with Erasmus, there had been a “revival of letters and the arts,” first in Florence, then in other Italian cities, and finally in the northern countries of Europe.

This conception falls short of the grandiose “Renaissance” discovered by Michelet’s febrile imagination and Burckhardt’s synthetic scholarship. The philosophes simplified much in the Renaissance that was complicated, missed much that was interesting. But they seized on the essential thing: when men of letters single out a preceding age for reviving letters, this is weighty praise. The revival was not merely literary: the Humanists’ passion for form and their search for pure classical texts was the precondition for a change in styles of thinking. Imitation—on this Gibbon insisted with special firmness—imitation is the foundation for independence, the youthful acquisition of the materials for autonomy: “Genius may anticipate the season of maturity, but in the education of a people, as in that of an individual, memory must be exercised, before the powers of reason and fancy can be expanded; nor may the artist hope to equal or surpass, till he has learned to imitate, the works of his predecessors.” Petrarch’s revolt and the revolt of his immediate successors had been largely a call for good taste: the Scholastics were barbarians to them because they wrote barbarous Latin. But form has its content: the search for texts exercises the critical mentality not merely by what it finds but by the way it seeks. Hence the philological rebellion issued in a philosophical revolution: “The study and imitation of the writers of ancient Rome,” Gibbon noted, brought in its train not merely a “purer style of composition” but also a “more generous and rational strain of sentiment.” In short, “in Italy, as afterwards in France and England, the pleasing reign of poetry and fiction was succeeded by the light of speculative and experimental philosophy.”16 Petrarch, after all, as I have said, was admirable to Gibbon because he revived not merely the study but also the spirit of the Augustan Age; and, we may add, Petrarch revived that spirit precisely by reviving the study.

Since the Enlightenment saw the Renaissance as an evolution, with the light of philosophy succeeding the reign of fancy, it was only natural that the philosophes should feel the closest affinity with the writers of the late Renaissance.

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