A Brief Overview of the Medieval Renaissance

Many of us are familiar with, or have at least heard of, the Renaissance. The 14th-century Italian revival in classical (Greek & Latin) learning meshed with contemporary European knowledge to produce new forms of art, scientific discoveries, and the maturation of many nascent political and religious ideas. The Italian Renaissance was an era unmatched in its raw human ambition. Richard Tarnas, author of The Passion of the Western Mind, encapsulates the pure progress ignited by the Renaissance:

Within the span of a single generation, Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael produced their masterworks, Columbus discovered the New World, Luther rebelled against the Catholic Church and began the Reformation, and Copernicus hypothesized a heliocentric universe and commenced the Scientific Revolution. Compared with his medieval predecessors, Renaissance man appeared to have suddenly vaulted into virtually superhuman status. (Tarnas 224).

The Renaissance without a doubt earned its reputation, but what if I told you there was another one that, while a little less dramatic and certainly less remembered than the Italian Renaissance, laid the groundwork for the Italian cultural combustion 200 years earlier? Believe it or not, there was. A “Scholastic Awakening”, including the rediscovery of ancient texts and the rebirth of the scientific mind, rocked the 13th-century world with its new focus on the natural world and the reliability of human reason. This medieval wave of neo-intellectualism began a scrutinizing, gradual, chiseling away at understanding the natural world through empirical science that would find one of its many apotheoses in the Italian Renaissance. But before we figure out what exactly happened, and how it all came to be, let's understand the environment that gave birth to our obscure renaissance.

The Medieval World

While it would be lovely to paint in detail the decline of classical culture and the emergence of hegemonic Western Christendom, a few broad strokes will have to suffice. The very short of it is that the medieval Western world (Europe) relied on the Catholic Church to be the primary pillar of society. From the smallest, most minute material facts to the highest transcendent spiritual reality, the institution of the Catholic Church maintained ultimate authority, becoming the medieval locus of art, learning, and spirituality. The Catholic Church took the place of ancient classical wisdom. The Greek teachings passed down for centuries from Socrates to Plato to Aristotle, touching on physical sciences, rhetoric, and morality, as well as the more industrious Roman innovations, such as civics, law, tactics, and city planning, had been superseded by Christian wisdom.

This replacement wasn’t exactly meant to be 1-to-1, though. Yes, the Catholic Church valued its stability and authority, but it also recognized that it ruled in the shadows of the fallen greats, and that the recession of classical knowledge and high culture was more the result of barbarian migrations and Islamic invaders having “cut off its access to the original Greek texts” (Tarnas 170) as Tarnas says, rather than tossing away ancient wisdom like an old toy. What ancient texts medieval people still had were locked away in the cloister chambers of monks, reserved only for study by the most parochial devotees of the Church.

Still, though, despite what may seem like a totalitarian regime, the Church would eventually foster independent study. As the Church became more and more calcified into the foundation of medieval society, insecurity about its collapse would decline, and what once started as an obscure, persecuted offshoot of Judaism would find itself at rest in the bedrock of the medieval milieu. The Church, although it had a tumultuous rise, would eventually find stability as a complete authority in medieval life. With a stable authority, the Church felt it had space to enable independent learning, and no longer felt the dire need to assert its own fledgling authority over rivaling cultures.

The Scholastic Awakening: The Medieval Renaissance

As the years went on, contact with the Far East (Islamic & Byzantine) cultures, where ancient Greek manuscripts had survived through Europe’s “dark ages”, began to flourish. The “Far East” in its intellectualism inspired a Western drive toward learning, which culminated in the beginnings of European Universities; the first of which was the Church-sponsored University of Paris, founded in 1170. The West had begun to develop an intense interest in the empirical sciences, with a renewed attitude of curiosity towards both the natural world and the human mind itself. Previously in the medieval world, human life and the natural world were seen as somewhat of an intermediary, a waiting room for the afterlife, and generally dismissed in favor of more spiritual aspirations. Now, there was a revitalized interest in the study of natural processes and the nature of human reality, a reorientation that would plant the seeds for Copernicus, Newton, and countless other scientists later down the line, as well as the development of modern science itself.

The fulcrum of this scientific revival lies in the rediscovery of Aristotle’s texts. Newly translated into Latin, Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Physics, and De Anima among other classical texts melted the freshly scientifically-tuned medieval mind with their scientific comprehensiveness. It is difficult to overstate the importance of Aristotle in the development of Medieval (and generally Western) science. I defer, again, to Tarnas to put into perspective the magnitude of such a discovery:

Medieval Europe’s sudden encounter with a sophisticated scientific cosmology, encyclopedic in breadth and intricately coherent, was dazzling to a culture that had been largely ignorant of these writings and ideas for centuries. Yet Aristotle had such an extraordinary impact precisely because that culture was so well prepared to recognize the quality of his achievement. His masterly summation of scientific knowledge, his codification of the rules for logical discourse, and his confidence in the power of human intelligence were all exactly concordant with the new tendencies of rationalism and naturalism growing in the medieval West--and were attractive to many Church intellectuals, men whose reasoning powers had been developed to uncommon acuity by their long scholastic education in the logical disputation of doctrinal subtleties…This shift in the wind of medieval thought would have monumentous consequences. (Tarnas 176).

Clearly, Aristotle was nothing less than a revelation for the new scientific tenor of medieval culture, but how safe was genuine, raw scientific inquisition in a culture so proverbially stuck in the vice-grip of a domineering Catholic Church? There were certainly clashes of opinion as Church authorities dueled with the empirically “fringe”, but eventually universities were granted the right to form their own communities- independent from the politics of kings and the doctrines of cardinals. Here we have a soft rebirth of intellectual independence from external authorities, and universities would begin to develop as “relatively autonomous centers of culture devoted to the pursuit of knowledge.” (Tarnas 177) in the grand way they are today.

Despite ecclesiastical resistances, the medieval culture took on more and more of an Aristotlean tenor as university circles grew and classical knowledge continued to spread. Eventually, the concept of human reason, once subordinate to faith in the medieval worldview, would be held with equal veracity as faith itself. As Tarnas writes, with the introduction of Aristotle and the new focus on the visible world, the early Scholastics’ understanding of “reason” as formally correct logical thinking began to take on a new meaning: Reason now signified not only logic but also empirical observation and experiment--i.e., cognition of the natural world. (Tarnas 178).

Reason’s primary function was once to argue and ascertain scriptural truth through arcane doctrinal differences- i.e. to “reason” through Church texts using logical deduction to better understand the rules and requirements of the Christian faith. Reason, thus, was seen merely as a tool to enhance and fortify one’s faith; not as a tool to conceive the immediate, tangible reality of the real world on its own terms and determine any kind of “truth”.

Perhaps the prime development, then, of the medieval Renaissance is its catapulting of human reason into the stratosphere of faith- giving it an authority and validity once exclusive to faith alone, and thus developing a confidence in human reason as a means to discern capital T Truth that all future scientists, from Ockham to Bohr, would come to ground their assumptions and experiments in. Not the least of these scientists and inventors, of course, being of the Italian Renaissance.

To Conclude

There is, of course, much more to the story than the broad strokes I have given you, but even a hazy outline of the medieval Renaissance makes it clear that the foundations of the Italian Renaissance, as well as modern Western science as whole, have their genesis in the obscure cloisters and budding classrooms of 13th-century monks and nascent university pupils alike. The thread of modern science, despite seeming contemporary, comes from a spool that has been running since the dawn of ancient Greece, and though the forms may change the essence remains. As different as everything seems nowadays, so funny how little has changed.

Sources

Tarnas, Richard. The Passion of the Western Mind. Ballantine Books. 1993.