And yet there is something stimulating in Machiavelli’s forthrightness. Reading him, we are brought face to face, as nowhere else so vividly, with a question that few philosophers had dared discuss: is statesmanship bound by morality? We may come to at least one conclusion: that morality can exist only among the members of a society equipped to teach and enforce it; and that an interstate morality awaits the formation of an international organization dowered with the physical power and the public opinion to maintain an international law. Till then the nations will be as beasts in the jungle; and whatever principles their governments may profess, their practice will be that of The Prince.
Looking back upon two centuries of intellectual revolt in Italy from Petrarch to Machiavelli, we perceive that its essence and basis lay simply in lessened concern for another world, and a rising affirmation of life. Men were delighted to rediscover a pagan civilization whose citizens were not worried about original sin or a punitive hell, and in which the natural impulses were accepted as forgivable elements in a vibrant society. Asceticism, self-abnegation, and the sense of sin lost their hold, almost their meaning, in the upper strata of the Italian population; monasteries languished for lack of novices, and monks and friars and popes themselves sought the joys of the earth rather than the stigmata of Christ. The bonds of tradition and authority relaxed; the massive fabric of the Church weighed more lightly on the thoughts and purposes of men. Life became more extrovert, and though this often took the form of violence, it cleansed many souls of neurotic fears and disorders that had darkened the medieval mind. The unfettered intellect disported itself happily in every field but science; the exuberance of emancipation hardly comported, as yet, with the discipline of experiment and the patience of research; that would come in the constructive aftermath of liberation. Meanwhile, among the educated, the practices of piety made room for the worship of intellect and genius; the belief in immortality was commuted into the quest for enduring renown. Pagan ideals like Fortune, Fate, and Nature encroached upon the Christian conception of God.
For all this a price had to be paid. The brilliant enfranchisement of the mind sapped the supernatural sanctions of morality, and no others were found to effectually replace them. The result was such a repudiation of inhibitions, such a release of impulse and desire, so gay a luxuriance of immorality, as history had not known since the Sophists had shattered the myths, freed the mind, and loosened the morals, of ancient Greece.
CHAPTER XX
The Moral Release
1300–1534
V. THE FOUNTS AND FORMS OF IMMORALITY
NOWHERE are the prejudices of the historian so likely to mislead him as when he seeks to determine the moral level of an age—unless it be in the kindred inquiry into the decline of religious belief. In either case the dramatic exception will strike his eye and turn it from the unrecorded average. His vision will be further blurred if he approaches the problem with a thesis to prove—as, for example, that religious doubt brings moral decay. And the records themselves are ambivalent, capable, according to the selective bias, of proving almost anything. The works of Aretino, the autobiography of Cellini, the correspondence of Machiavelli and Vettori can be stressed to convey the odor of disintegration; the letters of Isabella and Beatrice d’Este, of Elisabetta Gonzaga and Alessandra Strozzi can be quoted to paint a picture of sisterly tenderness and ideal family life. The reader will have to be on his guard.
Many factors entered into the moral decline that accompanied the intellectual exaltation of the Renaissance. Probably the basic factor was the growth of wealth that resulted from Italy’s strategic position on the routes of trade between western Europe and the East, and from the flow of tithes and annates out of a thousand Christian communities into Rome. Sin became more prevalent as more funds were provided to meet its costs. The spread of wealth weakened the ascetic ideaclass="underline" men and women came to resent an ethic that had been born of poverty and fear, and that now ran counter to both their impulses and their means. They heard with rising sympathy the view of Epicurus that life should be enjoyed, and that all pleasures are to be accounted innocent until proved guilty. The charms of woman triumphed over the prohibitions of theology.
Perhaps next to wealth the main source of immorality was the political unsettlement of the times. The strife of factions, the frequency of war, the influx of foreign mercenaries, and, later, the invasion of Italy by foreign armies recognizing no moral restraints on Italian soil, the repeated disruption of agriculture and trade by the ravages of war, the destruction of freedom by despots who replaced peaceful legitimacy with autocratic force: all these disordered Italian life, and cracked the “cake of custom” that normally conserves morality. Men found themselves unmoored in a sea of violence. Neither state nor Church seemed able to protect them; they protected themselves as best they could, by arms or craft; lawlessness became the law. The despots, placed above the law and dedicated to a short but stirring life, indulged themselves in every pleasure; and their example was followed by the moneyed minority.
In assessing the role of religious unbelief in releasing the natural immorality of mankind, we must begin by distinguishing the skepticism of the lettered few from the persistent piety of the many. Enlightenment is of minorities, and emancipation is individual; minds are not freed en masse. A few skeptics might protest against false relics and bogus miracles and indulgences offering promissory notes for cash; but the people accepted them with awe and hope. In 1462 the scholar-Pope Pius II and some cardinals went out to the Milvian Bridge to meet the head of the Apostle Andrew, which was arriving from Greece; and the scholar-Cardinal Bessarion pronounced a solemn oration when the precious figment was deposited in St. Peter’s. The people undertook pilgrimages to Loreto and Assisi, flocked to Rome in jubilee years, made the stations of the cross from church to church, and mounted on their knees the Scala Santa which, they were told, was the very stairway that Christ had climbed to the tribune of Pilate. Powerful characters might laugh at all this while their health was good, but rare was the Renaissance Italian who did not ask for the sacraments on his deathbed. Vitellozzo Vitelli, the rough condottiere who had fought Alexander VI and Caesar Borgia, begged a messenger to go to Rome and seek papal absolution for him before Caesar’s handy man tightened the noose around his neck. Women especially worshiped Mary; almost every village had a miracle-working icon of her; now (c. 1524) the Rosary became a favorite form of prayer. Every decent house had a crucifix and a holy picture or two; and before one or more of these, in many homes, a lamp was kept burning endlessly. Village squares and city streets might be adorned with a statue of Jesus or the Virgin, placed in a separate tabernacle or a niche in a wall. The festivals of the religious calendar were celebrated with a pomp and magnificence that gave the people thrilling interruptions to their toil; and every decade or so the coronation of a pope offered processions and games that to antiquarians recalled the spectacles of ancient Rome. Never was a religion more beautiful than when the artists of the Renaissance housed and carved its shrines, and painted its heroes and legends, and drama, music, poetry, and incense joined in the colorful, odorous, sumptuous worship of God.