Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 12.djvu/853

 REMT

765

RENAISSANCE

Remy, Abbey of Saint, founded at Reims before 590. Its early history is very obscure; at first a little chapel dedicated to St. Cliristopher, it obtained great renown when it acquired the relics of St. Remy in 553, and gifts poured in upon it from pious donors. By the ninth century the abbey possessed about 700 do- mains and was i^erhaps the richest in France. It seems probable that secular priests were the first guards of the relics, but were succeeded by the Benedictines. From 780 to 945 the archbishops of Reims were its abbots. It was there that Charlemagne received Leo III. In 1005 the Abbot Aviard undertook to rebuild the Church of St-Remy, and for twenty years the work went on uninterruptedly but then collapsed. The Abbot Theodoric erected a magnificent basilica which in 1049 Leo IX dedicated and granted many special privileges. The schools and the library were, during the Middle Ages, of such great repute that Alexander III wTOte a commendatory letter to the Abbot Peter. The archbishops of Reims and several princes, Carloman, Charlemagne's brother, Henri d'Orleans (d. about 1653), and several kings, Louis IV and Lothaire, were buried in the monastery.

Among the illustrious men of the abbey may be mentioned: Henri de Lorraine (1622-1641), who affiliated, in 1642, the abbev to the Congregation of St. Maur; J. Nicolas Colbert (1665), later Arch- bishop of Rouen; Charles Maurice le Tellier (1680- 1710); and Joseph de Rothechouart, appointed abbot by the king in 1745.

Gallia Christiana, IX (1731) 219-239; Varit, Statuts de I'abhaye de St-Remy in Arch, lefisl. Reims, I (1844). 165-99; Gu^R.tRD, Polyptique de Vabbaye de .St-Remy (Paris, 1853); PoussiN, Monographie de Vabbaye de St-Remy (Reims, 1854): MouNiER, Obit. Franc. (Paris, 1890), 194; Chevalier, Sacra- mentaires et martyrotoges de Vabbaye de St-Remy in Bibl. Lilurg., VII (Paris, 1900), 305-57; Lecestre, Abbayes, prieurea et couients d'hommes en France (Paris, 1902), 12.

Joseph Dedieu.

Renaissance, The, may be considered in a general or a particular sense, as (1) the achievements of what is termed the modern spirit in opposition to the spirit which prevailed during the Middle Ages; or (2) the revival of classic, especially of Greek, learning and the recovery of ancient art in the departments of sculp- ture, painting, and architecture, lost for a thousand years in Western Christendom. Impossible though it be to separate these elements from the whole move- ment into which they enter, we may distinguish them from it for our present purpose, viz., to sum up the influences, whether good or evil, which are tr.iceable to the antique, pre-Christian, or pagan world of letters and pla.stic remains, as it came to be known and studied from the end of the fourteenth century onwards, in relation to the CathoUc Church. For ecclesiastical history goes through periods analogous to the changes brought about by secular revolutions. Roughly speaking, the age of the Fathers corresponds to the imperial Roman period, closing in a. d. 476; the Middle Ages occupy those tumultuous years when barbarians turned Christians were learning slowly to be civilized, from 476 to 1400; while the modern relations of Church and State begin with the definite emergence of nationalities in the West, at an era most critical, signalized by the destruction of the Greek Empire, the invention of printing from movable type, the discovery of America, and all this leading on to the Protestant Reformation. Historj-, like life, is a con- tinuous web ; its various stages pass into one another by the finest degrees. But after the Great Schism was healed by the Council of Constance in 1417, the Church, turning her back once for all on a worn-out feudalism, and no longer engaged in strife with Teuton emperors, found herself in the presence of new difficulties, and the character of the times was mani- festly altered.

We are dwelling now in this modern epoch. The Middle Ages have become an interlude, clearly

bounded on both e.vtremities by a more civilized or humane idea of life, which men are endeavouring to realize in politics, education, manners, literature, and religion. This blending of widely dissevered ages and peoples by virtue of a complex type into a consistent, though greatly enlarged historical system, has been due to the Renaissance, taken as a whole. A glance at the map will remind us of the striking fact that Chris- tianity is bound up in space no less than in time with the Greek and Roman World. It has never yet flour- ished extensively outside these borders, except in so far as it subdued to ancient culture the tribes to which it offered the Gospel. There is a mysterious and providential link, recognized in the New Testament by St. Paul, St. John, and St. Peter, between Rome as the head of secular dominion and the visible King- dom of Christ. Roman law protected as well as per- secuted the disciples; Greek philosophy lent its terms to Cathohe dogma. The School of Alexandria, taught by Clement and Origen, did not scruple to quote Athenian literature in illustration of revealed truths. St. Gregory of Nazianzus wrote Greek poems in a style which was moulded on the classic tragedians. There was always iu the West a Puritan spirit, of which from Tertullian and Novatian down to the Spanish Priscillian we may note examples; but the saints who established our tradition — Cyprian, Au- gustine, Jerome — held more tolerant views; and though St. Jerome felt compunctious visitings for the days and nights he had given to Plautus or Cicero, his OV.TL diction is severely classic. His Latin Vulgate, also, while it obeys the construction of the Hebrew, is WTitten in cultivated, not in rustic, language. St. Gregory the Great despised grammar as a subordinate accomplishment, but was himself a good scholar.

The loss of Greek authors and the decline of Church La,tin into barbarism were misfortunes in a universal ruin; neither of these events was the consequence of a deliberate break with antiquity. Latin and Greek had become sacred languages; the Western and East- ern liturgies carried them with Holy Scripture wher- ever they went. Catholic Rome was Latin by tradi- tion and by choice. No German dialect ever attained to the privileges of the sanctuary which St. Cyril won for the Old Slavic from Pope Nicholas I. Under these circumstances, a revival of learning, so soon as the West was capable of it, might have been foreseen. And it was equally to be anticipated that the Vatican would not reject a movement of reconciliation, akin to that whereby so many of the ancient usages had been long ago adapted to Christian ends. Speaking of the second century, Walter Pater observes: "\Miat has been on the whole the method of the Church, as a 'power of sweetness and patience', in dealing with matters like pagan art, pagan literature, was even then manifest." There had been, at that day, an "earlier and unimpeachable Renaissance". The Catholic principle, in accordance with its name, assimilates, purifies, consecrates, all that is not sin, provided that it will submit to the law of holiness. And the central classic authors, on whose study liberal education has been set up from the age of Aristotle among Greeks, from the Augustan era in Rome, were happily amenable to this cleansing baptism. As a literature, the chief schoolbooks were singularly free from moral deformities; their teaching fell short of the New Testament; but it was often heroic, and its perils admitted of correction. Newman happily describes Graeco-Roman civilization as "the soil in which Christianity grew up". And Pater concludes that "it was by the bishops of Rome . . . that the path of what we must call humanism was thus de- fined", as the ideal, namely, of a perfect training in wisdom and beauty. Quite in unison with such a temper of mind. Pope Leo X in 1515 wrote to Bero- aldo, the editor of Tacitus: "Nothing more excellent or useful has been given to men by the Creator, if we