A World Lit Only by Fire by William Manchester Read Free Book Online

saint, would have found his worst suspicions confirmed by the new philosophy of nominalism. Denying the existence of universals,
     nominalists declared that the gulf between reason and revelation was unbridgeable—that to believe in virgin birth and the
     resurrection was completely unreasonable. Men of faith who might have challenged them, such as Thomas à Kempis, seemed lost
     in a dream of mysticism.
    At the same time, a subtle but powerful new spirit was rising in Europe. It was virulently subversive of all medieval society,
     especially the Church, though no one recognized it as such, partly because its greatest figures were devout Catholics. During
     the pontificate of Innocent III (1198–1216) the rediscovery of Aristotelian learning—in dialectic, logic, natural science,
     and metaphysics—had been readily synthesized with traditional Church doctrine. Now, as the full cultural heritage of Greece
     and Rome began to reappear, the problems of synthesis were escalating, and they defied solution. In Italy the movement was
     known as the Rinascimento. The French combined the verb
renaître
, “revive,” with the feminine noun
naissance
, “birth,” to form Renaissance—rebirth.

    F IXING A DATE for the beginning of the Renaissance is impossible, but most scholars believe its stirrings had begun by the early 1400s.
     Although Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Saint Francis of Assisi, and the painter Giotto de Bondone—all of whom seem to have
     been infused with the new spirit—were dead by then, they are seen as forerunners of the reawakening. In the long reach of
     history, the most influential Renaissance men were the writers, scholars, philosophers, educators, statesmen, and independent
     theologians. However, their impact upon events, tremendous as it was, would not be felt until later. The artists began to
     arrive first, led by the greatest galaxy of painters, sculptors, and architects ever known. They were spectacular, they were
     most memorably Italian, notably Florentine, and because their works were so dazzling—and so pious—they had the enthusiastic
     blessing and sponsorship of the papacy. Among their immortal figures were Botticelli, Fra Filippo Lippi, Piero della Francesca,
     the Bellinis, Giorgione, Della Robbia, Titian, Michelangelo, Raphael, and, elsewhere in Europe, Rubens, the Brueghels, Dürer,
     and Holbein. The supreme figure was Leonardo da Vinci, but Leonardo was more than an artist, and will appear later in this
     volume, trailing clouds of glory.
    When we look back across five centuries, the implications of the Renaissance appear to be obvious. It seems astonishing that
     no one saw where it was leading, anticipating what lay round the next bend in the road and then over the horizon. But they
     lacked our perspective; they could not hold a mirror up to the future. Like all people at all times, they were confronted
     each day by the present, which always arrives in a promiscuous rush, with the significant, the trivial, the profound, and
     the fatuous all tangled together. The popes, emperors, cardinals, kings, prelates, and nobles of the time sorted through the
     snarl and, being typical men in power, chose to believe what they wanted to believe, accepting whatever justified their policies
     and convictions and ignoring the rest. Even the wisest of them were at a hopeless disadvantage, for their only guide in sorting
     it all out—the only guide anyone ever has—was the past, and precedents are worse than useless when facing something entirely
     new. They suffered another handicap. As medieval men, crippled by ten centuries of immobility, they viewed the world through
     distorted prisms peculiar to their age.
    In all that time nothing of real consequence had either improved or declined. Except for the introduction of waterwheels in
     the 800s and windmills in the late 1100s, there had been no inventions of significance. No startling new ideas had appeared,
     no new territories outside