The Contribution of the Renaissance

WueEn Wyclif died, the driving force for a Bible which all might read unmolested was gone. One hundred years after his death, England as a nation was still without the Word of God. The man who had taken the first great step, the man who had made the first complete English translation, was needed to carry forward the fight. It was impossible for popular interest in religion to continue at the white heat with which it had burned during his lifetime. Unsympathetic kings and a priesthood desirous of holding the people in ignorance forcibly suppressed general reading of the Bible. To be sure, many copies of Wyclif’s translation were cherished in hidden corners and read by the light of the surreptitious candle. But

40 they were read only on pain of persecution. Circumstances militated against the speedy consummation of Wyclif’s reforms. For one thing, there were no printing presses to disseminate his writings. Much as his Bible and his tracts were circulated in manuscript, they could never reach the people as printed books can. Furthermore, the language was in a state of acute change. In 1500 English was a different tongue from what it had been in 1400. Inflectional endings had been sloughed off, new words had been added, even the syntax was different.

Important though it was as one of the causes which gave rise to religious freedom in England, Wyclif’s translation was not, therefore, the chief source of the Bible which we read. For the background of this version, we must look rather to the scholarship of the Renaissance.

Certain movements in the history of thought are pivotal. They stand out with monumental distinctness. Lacking under-

41 standing of them, one cannot hope to view the course of humanity from the right perspective, for they strike their roots deep into all phases of life. Such a movement was the Renaissance, that extraordinary revival of interest in learning, art, and life itself that followed the dark mediaeval years. The middle ages were fundamentally a time of repression of much that is normal and wholesome in life. Education was for the few, and even for them it was strangled beneath the iron collar of a rigid system of formalistic studies. Authority, and that of the most literal and autocratic kind, reigned supreme over the domain of the intellect. Men’s minds were not shrunken; they were merely turned away from earth to look with peculiar intensity toward another world. Therefore, tradition for this period records the absurdity of great minds debating with austere logic the number of angels that could dance on the point of a needle. Learning was confined to the monastery schools and

42 a few universities, themselves dominated by the church. Unrelated to the concrete problems of life, impatient of beauty in literature and art, mediaeval education was impracticable without the compensation of being devoted to attractive ideals. Of regard for the warm and pulsing life that is in true beauty, there was comparatively little.

The barbarian hordes had submerged Rome and with it much of the intellectual heritage of the past. But the mind of man is too adventurous to remain long enthralled by any outlook on life that stultifies the finer faculties. As early as the first. part of the thirteenth century there were indications of the coming revolt. Frederick II’ of Sicily, for instance, dared to question the hitherto unimpeachable authority of Aristotle, the infallible god of mediaeval thought. In the thirteenth century men began to discover some of the lost classics, hidden away in

* 1194-1250. 43 monasteries. The effect of contact with these masterpieces was immediate. The brilliancy of a Petrarch and a Boccaccio reflects their stimulus. Originally confined to Italy, the new insight into life spread rapidly. Students from far and near flocked to the Italian cities in order to listen to the lectures of such renowned scholars as Manuel Chrysoloras, who was the first to bring from Constantinople to Europe knowledge of the Greek tongue. In such teaching as his, they found the way to a new world of thought and of emotion. Travellers like Chaucer, Tipthorpe, and Linacre came into personal contact with the movement at its fountain head and transferred its inspiration to England. By the middle of the sixteenth century most of Europe was stirred with zeal for the new learning. Realizing that intellectual and aesthetic enjoyment is not in itself sinful, scholars threw themselves into the mastery of the great literature and art bequeathed by antiquity to the world. “For

44 the first time,” says Taine, “men opened their eyes and saw.”

This enthusiasm for the things of the higher faculties was of such power that its influence spread to fields other than the literary and the artistic. Epoch-making invention, discovery and exploration broadened the whole conception of man’s relation to the world. Copernicus propounded his theory, and thereafter men could not believe with Ptolemy that the earth is the center of the universe; Columbus, Drake, Raleigh, and Magellan discovered new continents; Gutenberg invented printing. Such widening of the horizon of thought and feeling that gradually and inevitably resulted from the Renaissance made itself felt in all phases of life. Especially did it react upon religion. The increasingly broad point of view proved the unwisdom of superstitious concealment of the Scriptures from those whose faith waa founded upon them. Through books printed from movable type tremendous impetus was

45 given to the circulation of translations of the Bible. In 1452 Gutenberg published the Latin Version; the last years of the fifteenth century saw one hundred editions of the Bible in Spanish, Italian, French, Dutch, German, and Bohemian. Even the original Hebrew of the Old Testament was printed in 1488 — a boon to the Biblical scholarship of the time.;

At about this time’ was born Desiderius Erasmus. His was the most brilliant mind produced by humanism, that high development of learning that was the very quintessence of the Renaissance; his was the scholarship that laid the foundation for impartial accuracy in the rendering of Scripture. In 1516 he edited the Greek New Testament, making an independent study of the text and adding illuminating comment. His book had a far-reaching influence. At the time of his deepest poverty Erasmus had found

®c. 1466. 46 aid in England. He had been received at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. He had been befriended by men of position and scholarship such as John Colet, Sir Thomas More, and Archbishop Warham. His lectures had been heard with interest and approbation; his writings had been warmly praised. Consequently his Greek Testament was read by the finest minds of the nation. It was a daring work, for Erasmus had labored independently of the traditional Vulgate. His intention was to strip the text of the mass of dogma with which the church had covered it. He hated ignorance and superstition. “J wish,” he wrote, “that even the weakest woman might read the Gospels and the Epistles of St. Paul. ... I long for the day when the husbandman shall sing portions of them to himself as he follows the plough, when the weaver shall hum them to the tune of his shuttle, when the traveller shall while away with their stories the weariness of his journey.” But, great scholar that

47 he was, he realized that his dream could never come true so long as Christendom was bound to the traditional Latin renderings. Therefore, a pioneer in the field of New Testament scholarship, he produced his edition of the Greek Testament — a work to which the makers of the Authorized Version as

well as their predecessors were profoundly indebted.