Andrew Martin Fairbairn

“ Thought rises, like sense and instinct, from lower to higher forms. Heroic love, which desires the intuition of the truth, drives us ever upwards, that we may attain the perfect rest where understanding and will are unified.
Bruno's speculations were those of a poet as well as a philosopher; and were in various ways prophetic. His death by fire at Rome signified that Italy had neither the wit nor the will to understand men of his kind; that for her the Renaissance had run its course, so that men must pursue its problems elsewhere in the hope of a more satisfactory solution. ”

“ Hence the thought whose course we have to follow is thought in transition, dealing with the old questions, yet waking to the new, quickened by what is behind to enquire into what is within and foreshadow what is before. But, while the thought that is to concern us may thus be described as moving in the realm of our ultimate religious ideas, the thought that is not to concern us moves in the realm of political and social theory. ”

“ If religion be moral then man must be free. And though his freedom may be incapable of rational proof yet it is a matter of conscious experience. This, indeed, may seem incompatible with Providence, which Aristotle conceived as general rather than particular, though we conceive it as a general made up of all particulars; but where philosophy is blind revelation may see, and it is better to trust it than to walk in darkness. The God who governs has created, and creation was willed in eternity, but happens in time, for Aristotle's idea of an eternal creation is sophistical. ”

“ If we read Boehme from this point of view, how splendid his dreams and how reasonable his very extravagances become! We are not surprised to hear him speak of the necessity of antitheses to all being, and especially to the life and thought of God, of evil being as necessary as good, or wrath as essential as love in God, who is the fundament of hell as well as of heaven, both the everlasting No, and the eternal Yes. He dwells in nature as the soul dwells in the body; there is no point in the body where the soul is not, no spot in space and no atom in nature where we can say, "God is not here." ”

“ Behind this the memory of men did not go, and into the darkness beyond the eye could as little penetrate as the vision of the man can trace the growth of knowledge in his own infant mind.
Now these differing conditions made it as natural that the Teutonic Renaissance should concern itself with the early Christian ideal as that the Latin should with the ancient classical literature; and, where they touched religion, that the one should be more occupied with its intellectual side and the other with its institutional; for where the Roman Empire had lived the Roman Church now governed. ”

“ It is customary to distinguish the Renaissance, as the revival of letters, from the Reformation as the revival of religion. But the distinction is neither formally correct nor materially exact. The Renaissance was not necessarily secular and classical-it might be, and often was, both religious and Christian; nor was the Reformation essentially religious and moral-it might be and often was political and secular. Of the two revivals the one is indeed in point of time the elder; but the elder is not so much a cause as simply an antecedent of the younger. ”

“ With the latter, the great modern intellectual systems may be said to begin; and to it belong such names as Bacon and Descartes, Hobbes and Locke, Spinoza and Leibniz, Gassendi and Malebranche. But without the earlier century the later would have been without its problems and therefore without its thinkers. The preeminence of the one in religion involved the preeminence of the other in thought; for what exercises the spirit tends to emancipate speculation and raises issues that reason must discuss and resolve before it can be at peace with itself and its world. ”

“ And this unity signifies that order reigns in the universe; that its phenomena are connected; that individual things are yet not insulated; and this coherence implies that all are animated by a common life and moved by a common cause. And this cause must be as infinite as the universe; for an infinite effect can proceed only from an infinite cause, and such a cause can be worthily expressed only in such an effect. But there is no room for two infinities to exist at the same moment in the same place; and so the effect must be simply the body of the cause, the cause the soul of the effect. ”

“ TENDENCIES OF EUROPEAN THOUGHT IN THE AGE OF THE REFORMATION.
When the sixteenth century opens, the West, with the exception of Italy, is still medieval, distinguished by a superficial uniformity of mind, thinking ideas which it has ceased to believe and using a learned tongue which it can hardly be said to understand. When the century closes, the West, with the possible exception of Italy, now fallen as far to the rear as she once stood in the van, has become modern ”

“ He conceived this universe as infinite, and so rejected the ancient scholastic idea of a limited nature with its distinctions and divisions of place, its here and there, its above and below, its cycles and epicycles. But the universe, which has no centre and therefore no circumference, has yet a unity for consciousness, and wherever consciousness is its unity appears. ”

“ In Germany, where the main intellectual interest was theological and confessional, Martin Luther gave the people hymns that often sound like echoes of the Hebrew Psalter; Kepler, listening to the music which nature reserves for the devout ear, discovered the unity which moves through her apparent disorder; and Jakob Boehme, though but a cobbler, had visions of higher mysteries than the proud can see. The Netherlands proved their heroism in their struggle for independence, and their love of knowledge in the tolerant reasonableness that made them a home for the persecuted of all lands. ”

“ Where man is so ignorant he ought not to be dogmatic; where truth is what all seek and no one can be sure that he finds, i.e. where it is nothing but a mere probability, it is a folly to spill human blood for it.
God is unknown even in religion; as many as the nations of men so many are the forms under which He is worshipped. And when they try to conceive and name Him, they degrade Him to their own level. God is made in the image of man rather than man in the image of God; to the Ethiopian He is black, to the Greek He is white, and lithe and graceful ”

“ It is as little soluble by the natural reason as the cognate question whether the world is eternal or created; in each case the problem as to the beginning holds the key of the problem as to the end. The Aristotelian Schoolmen had argued that the capacity of the soul to think the eternal and will the universal implied its immortality. But what is the soul? We cannot define it as thought percipient of the universal reason, for there can be no thought without ideas and no ideas without sense. The soul which lives within nature must develop according to natural law and in obedience to it. ”

“ And this conclusion is worked out in connexion with the moral doctrine that man is bound to act from love of virtue and horror of vice, and not from any hope of reward or fear of punishment, and so to act as to make all nature the better for his action. Reason, then, must conclude that the soul is mortal; but religion comes to our aid, and by teaching us to believe in the resurrection of the body resolves our doubts. Of this doctrine philosophy knows nothing, and so we can hold it only as an article of faith. ”

“ In the north the Renaissance made its home in the schools, and worked for the improvement of the education, the amelioration of the laws, and the reform of religion, as names like Bude, Pierre de la Ramée, and Beza, may help us to realise; but in the south it was more personal and less localised, its learning was nearer akin to culture than to education, and it loved literature more than philosophy. ”

“ A modern admirer sees, in the eyes uplifted to the blue, a spirit that would have no dark image stand between him and the living God.
It is customary now to describe Bruno's system as a form of pantheism. The term was not known then, or indeed for more than a hundred years after his death, which means that the idea is as modern as the term. Bruno was roundly named, just as Spinoza was later, an atheist, for men thought it was all one to identify God with nature and to deny His independent existence. ”

“ The God with whom it started was not an abstract and isolated but a living and related Deity; and man it conceived sub specie aetermtatis, as a being whom God had made and ruled. The very limitation of its field was an enlargement of its scope; its primary datum was the Eternal God, and its secondary was the created universe, especially the man who bore the image of his Maker. This man was no mere individual or insulated unit, but a race- a connected, coherent, organic unity. The human being was local, but human nature was universal; before the individual could be, the whole must exist ”

“ God and man, good as identical with God and evil as inseparable from man, are recognised, and the problem is: how is the good to overcome the evil? The man who frames the problem is a mystic; God is the supreme desire and delight of his soul; and he conceives sin as a sort of inverted capacity for God, the dust which has stifled a thirst and turned it into an infinite misery. Now, Luther has two forms under which he conceives God's relation to man, a juristic denoted by the term "justification," and a vital denoted by the term "faith." ”

“ The truths of religion are the contradictions of the reason; the processes of the reason cannot serve the cause of religion. The new scholasticism was a philosophy of reasoned ignorance where the cardinal verities of religion were the inconceivabilities of thought,
But here certain new forces which seriously affected the course and the development of Latin thought must be referred to and analysed. The ecclesiastical situation began to change, and the temper of the Renaissance changed with it. ”

“ And if Rome lived in the dust of her ancient roads and the ruins of her temples, the Italian peoples and States seemed singularly suggestive of Greece. Their republics and tyrants, their civic life and military adventurers, their rich cities with their colonies and commerce, their rapid changes of fortune, their swift oscillations from freedom to bondage and from bondage back to freedom, their love of art and of letters, their mutual jealousies and ambitions were Greek rather than Roman ”

“ The ideal of human society is a religious ideal; but it is a consequence or a combination of religious ideas rather than one of the ideas themselves. Hence, though certain of the most potent thinkers of the sixteenth century occupied themselves with the constitution and order of human society, with the actual or ideal State both in itself and in relation to the actual or ideal Church, yet they must here be rigorously excluded, and our view confined to the thought that had to do with the religious interpretation of man and his Universe. ”

“ And just then John Reuchlin, German mystic and scholar, found Pico. He was older in years but younger in mind. He had studied philology in Paris, law in Orleans, and he had lectured on Greek in Tübingen; he was then on his second visit to Italy, with all the mystic in him alive and unsatisfied. The God whom he wanted, the logic of the Schools could not give him; by their help he might transcend created existence, though even then what they led him to was only the boundless sea of negation. In Aristotle the impossible, in Plato the incredible, was emphasised ”

“ As the workman loves his handiwork so God loves all His creatures and wills their good. He has given to every being, not perhaps the absolutely best, but the best for it and for the universe, viewed in their complementary and reciprocal relations. For men supplement each other; what seems in and by itself a defect may become an excellency when seen from the standpoint of the collective whole. Man lives in humanity, humanity within nature, nature in God ”

“ Hence he searched for truth, successively in Aristotle, in Plato, in Plotinus, and in the pseudo-Dionysius, who seemed to many, even after Valla had written, the source of the highest and purest truth. But as Pico said, philosophy seeks truth, theology finds it, but religion possesses it; and the truth which religion possesses is God's. Man can best discover it in the place where God has been pleased to set it. ”

“ In Scotland William Dunbar, Gawin Douglas, and David Lindsay shed lustre upon the early decades of the century, while in its later years Reformers like Knox and scholars like Andrew Melville trained up a people who had imagination enough to love and achieve liberty without neglecting letters. The thought which at once effected and reflected so immense a revolution can be here traced only in the broadest outlines. ”