Chapter 12 11. Renaissance

There is a learned cartoonist on our land who likes to ask himself, what would bocce balls, crossword cards, violins, boiled laundry, and doormats see in the world? What I want to know, though, is the psychological reaction of the man tasked with manning a large modern siege gun.There are all sorts of strange jobs in war, but which one is more ridiculous than firing a beta-shaped cannon? The other soldiers more or less knew what they were doing. Pilots can tell from the soaring red light whether they have hit a gas plant. The submarine commander can return two or three hours later and judge the degree of success by the abandoned wreckage.

The poor people in Haogou know that if they insist on staying in a certain trench, they are holding their positions, and they are also complacent. Even an artilleryman in the field, after shooting at an invisible target, can pick up his earphones and ask his companions hiding in a dead tree seven miles away, whether the church spire to be destroyed shows signs of collapse, and whether the angle needs to be changed play one more time. But the brethren who wield the beta cannon live in a strange and false world of solitude.They rashly shoot their shells into the sky without being able to foresee what their fate will be, not even a knowledgeable professor of ballistics.The shell may have actually hit its target, or it may have landed in the heart of an arsenal or fortress.Yet it also hits a church or an orphanage, or quietly dives to the bottom of a river or plunges into a grave without causing any harm.

It seems to me that the writer is in many ways in common with the siege artillery.They were also manning a heavy artillery.Their literary cannonballs may cause revolution or unrest in the most unlikely places.But generally what was fired was poor duds, which lay silently in the nearby fields and ended up being scrapped, or turned into umbrella stands and flower pots. Indeed, in such a short period of time, so much pulp was consumed, which is unique in history. This era is commonly referred to as the "Renaissance". Every Tommaso, Ricardo, and Enrique on the Italian peninsula, every Doctor Thomasi, Professor Ricardus, and Domini Heinrich on the great Teutonic plain, hastily printed For my own works, the smallest paper I use is twelve, not to mention Tomasino who imitates the moving sonnets written by the Greeks and Riccardino who imitates the best poems written by the Roman ancestors. .There are also countless people who are keen to collect ancient coins, sculptures, statues, pictures, manuscripts and ancient armor. For almost three centuries, they have devoted themselves to classifying, sorting, tabulating and registering the things that have just been excavated from the ruins of their predecessors. , archiving and compilation, printed on countless folios, and accompanied by beautiful copperplates and exquisite woodcuts.

The invention of printing ruined Gutenberg, but made Frauben, Aldus, Aegean, and other new printing companies rich, and they profited from a strong desire for knowledge.However, the literary products of the Renaissance did not have a great effect in the world of the time - the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in which the writers lived.Those who contributed new ideas were only a few quill heroes, and like their friends who fired such cannons, they did not see with their own eyes how much success they achieved and how much damage their works caused.On the whole, however, they removed every obstacle in the way of progress.We should be grateful to them for sweeping cleanly and thoroughly the mountains of rubbish that, without them, would still get in the way of our thoughts.

But strictly speaking, the Renaissance was not a "looking forward" movement at first.It despises a past that has just vanished, calling the writings of previous generations "barbaric" (or "Gothic barbaric," since the Goths were once as infamous as the Huns).The main interest of the Renaissance was in the works of art, because there is a substance called "classical spirit" in the works of art. The Renaissance did bring about a great revival of freedom of conscience, tolerance, and a better world, but the leaders of the movement did not intend to do so.

Long before this, the question was raised as to what right the Bishop of Rome had to dictate in what language Bohemian peasants and English freemen must pray, in what spirit they must study the teachings of Jesus, and in what spirit they must be freed for their own indulgences. How much to pay, what books must be read and how to educate children.They blatantly defied the power of this super kingdom, only to be smashed to pieces by it.They even led or represented a national movement, but it inevitably failed. The smoldering ashes of the great Jan Huss were dishonorably thrown into the Rhine, a warning to the world that the papacy still reigned supreme.

Wycliffe's body was burned by the official executioner, who told the lower peasants of Leestia that the Privy Council and the Pope could still reach into the grave. Obviously, a frontal attack is impossible. The solid fortress of "tradition" has been gradually and meticulously built over fifteen centuries with great authority, and it is impossible to occupy it by external attack.There are also many scandals among the high walls.The three popes are at war, all claiming that they are legitimate and the only heir to St. Peter; the Holy See in Rome and Avignon is corrupt, and the laws are made only to make people destroy by spending money; the life of the monarch is completely morally corrupt; Under the guise of the increasing horrors of purgatory, the money-grubbing men demanded that poor parents pay large sums for their dead children;

However, some people who have no interest in Christian affairs and have no personal hatred for the pope and bishops fired a few cannonballs indiscriminately, but this old building collapsed. The "little pale man" of Prague aspires to the lofty ideals of Christian virtue, but what he has not done is fulfilled by a motley crew of common people.The gang wanted nothing more than to live and die (preferably in old age) patrons of all good things in the world, and devout disciples of the Church of Our Lady. They came from all corners of Europe, represented all walks of life, and would have bristled if historians of the time had revealed the true meaning of what they had done.

Take Marco Polo, for example. We know that he is an extraordinary traveler, and he has seen amazing sights, so it is no wonder that people in the western cities and big places call him "Million Dollar Marco".He described to people that the golden throne he saw was as high as a pagoda, and the length of the marble wall was as long as the distance from the Balkans to the Black Sea, which caused everyone to laugh. The little fellow was helpless, yet he played a most important role in the history of progress.His writing is not good.He also harbored the prejudices of his contemporaries and classes towards literature.A gentleman should wield a sword rather than a quill, so Mr. Marco is unwilling to be a writer.However, the war landed him in a Genoese prison.To pass the tedious time behind bars, he told a strange story of his life to a poor writer in his prison cell, and by this indirect way Europeans finally learned many things that they had never known before.Marco Polo was a simple-minded fellow who stubbornly believed he had seen a mountain in Asia Minor moved two miles by a devout saint who wanted to tell the heathen "what true faith can do"; Believing many of the popular tales of the headless man and the three-legged chicken, he told a story that surpassed anything in the previous thirteen hundred years and thereby overturned the ecclesiastical theory of geography.

Marco Polo, of course, was a devout disciple of the Church from birth to death, and would have been furious at anyone who compared him to the famous Roger Bacon, who was almost a contemporary of him.Bacon is an out-and-out scientist. In order to pursue knowledge, he reluctantly did not write for ten years and spent fourteen years in prison. But Poirot was the more dangerous of the two. At most, only one person in a hundred thousand people will follow Bacon to chase the rainbow in the sky, pondering the eloquent evolution theory to subvert the sacred views at that time, but ordinary people who have only learned ABC can learn from Marco Polo There are still things in the world that the writers of the Old Testament never thought of.

I do not mean that the mere publication of a book will cause a rebellion against the authority of the Bible before the world has gained an iota of freedom.Universal enlightenment is the result of centuries of painstaking preparation.Nevertheless, the modest proclamations of the explorers, navigators, and travelers were understood, and this played a major role in the rise of the skeptical spirit.Skepticism, characteristic of the late Renaissance, allowed men to say and write what only a few years ago would have brought one into the clutches of the Inquisition. Take, for example, the curious tales of Boccaccio, which his friends heard on the first day of their long and pleasant journey from Florence.The story tells that all religious institutions may have right and wrong.But if this statement is true, and all religious systems are equal to right and wrong, then many views cannot be proved or refuted. In this case, why should people who hold various views be sentenced to the gallows? The expeditions of such eminent scholars as Lorenzo Valla were even stranger.At the time of his death he was a much-worshipped government official in the Roman ecclesiastical regime.However, in his studies of Latin he proved irrefutably that the legend that Constantine the Great had bequeathed "Rome, Italy, and all the provinces of the West" to Pope Sylmister (and all popes since then) based on this, lording over all Europe) was nothing more than a poor hoax, concocted by a penniless magistrate in the papal court several hundred years after the emperor's death. You can also go back to more practical issues and look at those devout Christians who have been influenced by the thought of St. Augustine.St. Augustine had taught them that the beliefs held by those on the other side of the earth were blasphemous and heretical, and that those poor beings could not possibly see the Second Coming and therefore had no reason to live on earth.But what were these faithful men and women to make of St. Augustine's teachings when Vasco da Gama returned from his maiden voyage to India in 1499 and described the populous kingdom he found on the other side of the globe? These simple-minded people have been told that our world is a flat disk and that Jerusalem is the center of the universe.However, the "Vitoria" returned safely after voyaging around the world, which shows that there are many serious errors in geography in the "Old Testament", so who should these people believe? I repeat what I just said.The Renaissance was not an era of consciously studying science, and it was a pity that it lacked real interest in the spiritual field.Beauty and pleasure predominated in all things during these three hundred years.Although the Pope was furious against the heresies of some of his subjects, he was more than happy to invite the rebels to dinner as long as they were talkative and knew a little about printing and architecture.A zealous advocate of virtue, like Savonarola, runs as much danger as an agnostic, a clever young agnostic who, in verse and prose, attacks the fundamentals of the Christian faith with a vehemence that is by no means Gentle and drizzly. What people express is a new yearning for life, but there is undoubtedly a hidden dissatisfaction hidden in it, against the existing society and the church with supreme power that restrain the development of human understanding. There was a gap of nearly two centuries between Boccaccio and Erasmus.In these two hundred years, scribes and printers have never been idle.Almost all writings of importance, except those published by the Church itself, imply indirectly that Western society fell under the rule of ignorant monks as the chaos of barbarian invaders replaced the ancient civilizations of Greece and Rome. fell into a very tragic disaster. Contemporaries of Machiavelli and Lorenzo Medici were not very interested in ethics.They are practical and make the most of the real world.They professed to live in peace with the Church, which, because of its powerful organization and long claws, could do great harm, never took a conscious part in attempts at reform, or questioned the institutions which governed them. But their search for the past is never satisfied. They are constantly pursuing new stimuli, and their active thoughts are extremely unstable.People in this world are brought up with the belief that "we know", but since then people have asked the question, "Do we really know?" This is more worthy of later commemoration than Petrarch's sonnets and Raphael's paintings.