Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 2.djvu/34

 famous; as a man he headed the battle against the immorality and worldliness of the Curia. He was by no means illiterate, but in the pagan and sensual tendency of humanist literature and in the voluptuous freedom of art he saw the source of evil, and in Lorenzo and his sons pernicious patrons of corruption. Zeal against the immorality of the time, the worldliness of prelates and preachers, made him overlook the lasting gains that the Renaissance and humanism brought to humanity. He had no sympathy with this development of culture from the fresh young life of his own people. He did not understand the Young Italy of his day; behind this luxuriant growth he could not see the good and fruitful germ, and here, as in the province of politics, he lost touch with the pulse of national life. His plan of a theocratic State governed only by Christ, its invisible Head, was based on momentary enthusiasm and therefore untenable. He was too deficient in aesthetic sense to be able to rise in inward freedom superior to discords. Like a dead man amongst the living, he left Italy to bear the clash of those contradictions which the great mind of Julius II sought, unhappily in vain, to fuse in one conciliatory scheme.

Such a scheme of conciliation meantime made its appearance in Florence, not without the co-operation and probably the encouragement of the Medici. It was connected with the introduction of Platonism, which since the time of the Council of Florence in 1438 was represented in that city by enthusiastic and learned men like Bessarion, and was zealously furthered by Cosimo, the Pater Patriae, in the Academy which he had founded. From the learned societies started for these purposes come the first attempts to bring not only Plato's philosophy but the whole of classical culture into a close and essential connexion with Christianity. Platonism seemed to them the link which joined Christianity with antiquity. Bessarion himself had taught the internal relationship of both principles, and Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola made the explanation of this theory the work of their lives. If both of them went too far in their youthful enthusiasm and mysticism, and conceived Christianity almost as a continuation of Attic philosophy, this was an extravagance which left untouched the sincerity of their own belief, and from which Marsilio, when he grew older, attempted to free himself. Giovanni and Giulio de' Medici, son and nephew of Lorenzo, were both Marsilio's pupils. Both were destined to wear the tiara and took a decided part in the scheme for conciliating these contrasts, which Julius II set forth by means of Raffaelle's brush.

The victory of the Borgia over the monk of San Marco was not likely to discourage the sceptic and materialistic tendency, whose worst features were incarnate in Alexander VI and Cesare Borgia. Pietro Pomponazzi furthered it by his notorious phrase, that a thing might be true in philosophy and yet false in theology; a formula that spread its poison far and wide. Even then in Florence a genius was developing,