Bab Bab 36 · The Books They Printed

In the year 1471 there died a pious old man who had spent seventy-two

of his ninety-one years behind the sheltering walls of the cloister of

Mount St. Agnes near the good town of Zwolle, the old Dutch Hanseatic

city on the river Ysel. He was known as Brother Thomas and because he

had been born in the village of Kempen, he was called Thomas à Kempis.

At the age of twelve he had been sent to Deventer, where Gerhard Groot,

a brilliant graduate of the universities of Paris, Cologne and Prague,

and famous as a wandering preacher, had founded the Society of the

Brothers of the Common Life. The good brothers were humble laymen who

tried to live the simple life of the early Apostles of Christ while

working at their regular jobs as carpenters and house-painters and

stone masons. They maintained an excellent school, that deserving

boys of poor parents might be taught the wisdom of the Fathers of the

church. At this school, little Thomas had learned how to conjugate

Latin verbs and how to copy manuscripts. Then he had taken his vows,

had put his little bundle of books upon his back, had wandered

to Zwolle and with a sigh of relief he had closed the door upon a

turbulent world which did not attract him.

[Illustration: JOHN HUSS]

Thomas lived in an age of turmoil, pestilence and sudden death. In

central Europe, in Bohemia, the devoted disciples of Johannes Huss,

the friend and follower of John Wycliffe, the English reformer, were

avenging with a terrible warfare the death of their beloved leader

who had been burned at the stake by order of that same Council of

Constance, which had promised him a safe-conduct if he would come

to Switzerland and explain his doctrines to the Pope, the Emperor,

twenty-three cardinals, thirty-three archbishops and bishops, one

hundred and fifty abbots and more than a hundred princes and dukes who

had gathered together to reform their church.

In the west, France had been fighting for a hundred years that she

might drive the English from her territories and just then was saved

from utter defeat by the fortunate appearance of Joan of Arc. And no

sooner had this struggle come to an end than France and Burgundy were

at each other’s throats, engaged upon a struggle of life and death for

the supremacy of western Europe.

In the south, a Pope at Rome was calling the curses of Heaven down

upon a second Pope who resided at Avignon, in southern France, and who

retaliated in kind. In the far east the Turks were destroying the last

remnants of the Roman Empire and the Russians had started upon a final

crusade to crush the power of their Tartar masters.

[Illustration: THE CATHEDRAL]

But of all this, Brother Thomas in his quiet cell never heard. He had

his manuscripts and his own thoughts and he was contented. He poured

his love of God into a little volume. He called it the Imitation of

Christ. It has since been translated into more languages than any other

book save the Bible. It has been read by quite as many people as ever

studied the Holy Scriptures. It has influenced the lives of countless

millions. And it was the work of a man whose highest ideal of existence

was expressed in the simple wish that “he might quietly spend his days

sitting in a little corner with a little book.”

Good Brother Thomas represented the purest ideals of the Middle Ages.

Surrounded on all sides by the forces of the victorious Renaissance,

with the humanists loudly proclaiming the coming of modern times,

the Middle Ages gathered strength for a last sally. Monasteries

were reformed. Monks gave up the habits of riches and vice. Simple,

straight-forward and honest men, by the example of their blameless

and devout lives, tried to bring the people back to the ways of

righteousness and humble resignation to the will of God. But all to no

avail. The new world rushed past these good people. The days of quiet

meditation were gone. The great era of “expression” had begun.

Here and now let me say that I am sorry that I must use so many

“big words.” I wish that I could write this history in words of

one syllable. But it cannot be done. You cannot write a text-book

of geometry without reference to a hypotenuse and triangles and a

rectangular parallelopiped. You simply have to learn what those words

mean or do without mathematics. In history (and in all life) you will

eventually be obliged to learn the meaning of many strange words of

Latin and Greek origin. Why not do it now?

When I say that the Renaissance was an era of expression, I mean this:

People were no longer contented to be the audience and sit still while

the emperor and the pope told them what to do and what to think. They

wanted to be actors upon the stage of life. They insisted upon giving

“expression” to their own individual ideas. If a man happened to be

interested in statesmanship like the Florentine historian, Niccolò

Macchiavelli, then he “expressed” himself in his books which revealed

his own idea of a successful state and an efficient ruler. If on the

other hand he had a liking for painting, he “expressed” his love for

beautiful lines and lovely colours in the pictures which have made the

names of Giotto, Fra Angelico, Rafael and a thousand others household

words wherever people have learned to care for those things which

express a true and lasting beauty.

[Illustration: THE MANUSCRIPT AND THE PRINTED BOOK]

If this love for colour and line happened to be combined with an

interest in mechanics and hydraulics, the result was a Leonardo da

Vinci, who painted his pictures, experimented with his balloons and

flying machines, drained the marshes of the Lombardian plains and

“expressed” his joy and interest in all things between Heaven and

Earth in prose, in painting, in sculpture and in curiously conceived

engines. When a man of gigantic strength, like Michael Angelo, found

the brush and the palette too soft for his strong hands, he turned to

sculpture and to architecture, and hacked the most terrific creatures

out of heavy blocks of marble and drew the plans for the church of St.

Peter, the most concrete “expression” of the glories of the triumphant

church. And so it went.

All Italy (and very soon all of Europe) was filled with men and women

who lived that they might add their mite to the sum total of our

accumulated treasures of knowledge and beauty and wisdom. In Germany,

in the city of Mainz, Johann zum Gänsefleisch, commonly known as Johann

Gutenberg, had just invented a new method of copying books. He had

studied the old woodcuts and had perfected a system by which individual

letters of soft lead could be placed in such a way that they formed

words and whole pages. It is true, he soon lost all his money in a

law-suit which had to do with the original invention of the press.

He died in poverty, but the “expression” of his particular inventive

genius lived after him.

Soon Aldus in Venice and Etienne in Paris and Plantin in Antwerp and

Froben in Basel were flooding the world with carefully edited editions

of the classics printed in the Gothic letters of the Gutenberg Bible,

or printed in the Italian type which we use in this book, or printed in

Greek letters, or in Hebrew.

Then the whole world became the eager audience of those who had

something to say. The day when learning had been a monopoly of a

privileged few came to an end. And the last excuse for ignorance was

removed from this world, when Elzevier of Haarlem began to print his

cheap and popular editions. Then Aristotle and Plato, Virgil and

Horace and Pliny, all the goodly company of the ancient authors and

philosophers and scientists, offered to become man’s faithful friend in

exchange for a few paltry pennies. Humanism had made all men free and

equal before the printed word.