THOMAS MORE et al.
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service under graziers, and as he had once kept the cows of Admetus, so he lived now
as a shepherd in Lower Austria. Here, however, having become suspected on account
of his beautiful singing, he was recognised by a learned monk as one of the old pagan
gods, and handed over to the spiritual tribunal. On the rack he confessed that he was
the God Apollo; and before his execution he begged that he might be suffered to play
once more upon the lyre, and to sing a song. And he played so touchingly, and sang
with such magic, and was withal so beautiful in form and feature, that all the women
wept, and many of them were so deeply impressed that they shortly afterwards fell
sick. And some time afterwards the people wished to drag him from the grave again,
so that a stake might be driven through his body, in the belief that he had been a
vampire, and that the sick women would by this means recover. But they found the
grave empty."
The Renaissance of the fifteenth century was, in many things, great rather by
what it designed than by what it achieved. Much which it aspired to do, and did but
imperfectly or mistakenly, was accomplished in what is called the eclaircissement of
the eighteenth century, or in our own generation; and what really belongs to the rival
of the fifteenth century is but the leading instinct, the curiosity, the initiatory idea. It is
so with this very question of the reconciliation of the religion of antiquity with the
religion of Christ. A modern scholar occupied by this problem might observe that all
religions may be regarded as natural products; that, at least in their origin, their
growth, and decay, they have common laws, and are not to be isolated from the other
movements of the human mind in the periods in which they respectively prevailed;
that they arise spontaneously out of the human mind, as expressions of the varying
phases of its sentiment concerning the unseen world; that every intellectual product
must be judged from the point of view of the age and the people in which it was
produced. He might go on to observe that each has contributed something to the
development of the religious sense, and ranging them as so many stages in the gradual
education of the human mind, justify the existence of each. The basis of the
reconciliation of the religions of the world would thus be the inexhaustible activity
and creativeness of the human mind itself, in which all religions alike have their root,
and in which all alike are reconciled; just as the fancies of childhood and the thoughts
of old age meet and are laid to rest, in the experience of the individual. Far different
was the method followed by the scholars of the fifteenth century. They lacked the
very rudiments of the historic sense, which, by an imaginative act, throws itself back
into a world unlike one's own, and estimates every intellectual creation in its
connexion with the age from which it proceeded; they had no idea of development, of
the differences of ages, of the gradual education of the human race. In their attempts
to reconcile the religions of the world, they were thus thrown back upon the quicksand
of allegorical interpretation. The religions of the world were to be reconciled, not as
successive stages, in a gradual development of the religious sense, but as subsisting
side by side, and substantially in agreement with each other. And here the first
necessity was to misrepresent the language, the conceptions, the sentiments, it was
proposed to compare and reconcile. Plato and Homer must be made to speak
agreeably to Moses. Set side by side, the mere surfaces could never unite in any
harmony of design. Therefore one must go below the surface, and bring up the
supposed secondary, or still more remote meaning, that diviner signification held in
reserve, in recessu divinius aliquid, latent in some stray touch of Homer, or figure of
speech in the books of Moses.
PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA
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And yet as a curiosity of the human mind, a "madhouse-cell," if you will, into
which we peep for a moment, and see it at work weaving strange fancies, the
allegorical interpretation of the fifteenth century has its interest. With its strange web
of imagery, its quaint conceits, its unexpected combinations and subtle moralising, it
is an element in the local colour of a great age. It illustrates also the faith of that age in
all oracles, its desire to hear all voices, its generous belief that nothing which had ever
interested the human mind could wholly lose its vitality. It is the counterpart, though
certainly the feebler counterpart, of that practical truce and reconciliation of the gods
of Greece with the Christian religion, which is seen in the art of the time; and it is for
his share in this work, and because his own story is a sort of analogue or visible
equivalent to the expression of this purpose in his writings, that something of a
general interest still belongs to the name of Pico della Mirandola, whose life, written
by his nephew Francesco, seemed worthy, for some touch of sweetness in it, to be
translated out of the original Latin by Sir Thomas More, that great lover of Italian
culture, among whose works this life of Pico, Earl of Mirandola, and a great lord of
Italy, as he calls him, may still be read, in its quaint, antiquated English.
Marsilio Ficino has told us how Pico came to Florence. It was the very day--
some day probably in the year 1482--on which Ficino had finished his famous
translation of Plato into Latin, the work to which he had been dedicated from
childhood by Cosmo de' Medici, in furtherance of his desire to resuscitate the
knowledge of Plato among his fellow-citizens. Florence indeed, as M. Renan has
pointed out, had always had an affinity for the mystic and dreamy philosophy of
Plato, while the colder and more practical philosophy of Aristotle had flourished in
Padua, and other cities of the north; and the Florentines, though they knew perhaps
very little about him, had had the name of the great idealist often on their lips. To
increase this knowledge, Cosmo had founded the Platonic academy, with periodical
discussions at the villa of Careggi. The fall of Constantinople in 1453, and the council
in 1438 for the reconciliation of the Greek and Latin Churches, had brought to
Florence many a needy Greek scholar. And now the work was completed, the door of
the mystical temple lay open to all who could construe Latin, and the scholar rested
from his labour; when there was introduced into his study, where a lamp burned
continually before the bust of Plato, as other men burned lamps before their favourite
saints, a young man fresh from a journey, "of feature and shape seemly and
beauteous, of stature goodly and high, of flesh tender and soft, his visage lovely and
fair, his colour white, intermingled with comely reds, his eyes grey, and quick of look,
his teeth white and even, his hair yellow and abundant," and trimmed with more than
the usual artifice of the time. It is thus that Sir Thomas More translates the words of
the biographer of Pico, who, even in outward form and appearance, seems an image of
that inward harmony and completeness, of which he is so perfect an example. The
word mystic has been usually derived from a Greek word which signifies to shut, as if
one shut one's lips, brooding on what cannot be uttered; but the Platonists themselves
derive it rather from the act of shutting the eyes, that one may see the more, inwardly.
Perhaps the eyes of the mystic Ficino, now long past the midway of life, had come to
be thus half-closed; but when a young man, not unlike the archangel Raphael, as the
Florentines of that age depicted him in his wonderful walk with Tobit, or Mercury, as
he might have appeared in a painting by Sandro Botticelli or Piero di Cosimo, entered
his chamber, he seems to have thought there was something not wholly earthly about
him; at least, he ever afterwards believed that it was not without the co-operation of
the stars that the stranger had arrived on that day. For it happened that they fell into a
conversation, deeper and more intimate than men usually fall into at first sight. During