Читать книгу Albert Dürer - T. Sturge Moore - Страница 23

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Erasmus, the typical humanist, the man who loved humanity so much that he felt that his love for it might tempt him to fight against God, travelled from the one world to the other; passed from the society of cardinals and princes to the seclusion of burgher homes in London, or to chat with Dürer at Antwerp. He belonged perhaps to neither world at heart; but how greatly his love and veneration of the one exceeded his admiration and sense of the practical utility of the other, a comparison of his sketch of Colet with such a note as this from his New Testament makes abundantly plain:

"I saw with my own eyes Pope Julius II. at Bologna, and afterwards at Rome, marching at the head of a triumphal procession as if he were Pompey or Cæsar. St. Peter subdued the world with faith, not with arms or soldiers or military engines. St. Peter's successors would win as many victories as St. Peter won if they had Peter's spirit."

But we must not forget that the book in which these notes appeared was published with the approval of a Pope, and that he and others sought its author for advice as to how to cope best with their more hot-headed enemy Martin Luther. We must also remember that we are told that Colet "was not very hard on priests and monks who only sinned with women. He did not make light of impurity, but thought it less criminal than spite and malice and envy and vanity and ignorance. The loose sort were at least made human and modest by their very faults, and he regarded avarice and arrogance as blacker sins in a priest than a hundred concubines." This spirit was not that of the Reformation which came to stop, yet it existed and was widespread at that time; it was I think the spirit which either formed or sustained most of the great artists. At any rate it both formed and sustained Albert Dürer. Yet the true nature of these ideas, derived from Jesus, could not be understood even by Colet, even by Erasmus. For them it was tradition which gave value and assured truth to Christ's ideas, not the truth of those ideas which gave value to the traditions and legends concerning him. The value of those ideas was felt, sometimes nearer, sometimes further off; it was loved and admired; their lives were apprehended by it, and spent in illustrating and studying it, as were also those of Albert Dürer and Michael Angelo. To understand the life and work of such men, we must form some conception of the true nature and value of those ideas, as I have striven to do in this chapter. Otherwise we shall merely admire and love them, as they admired and loved Jesus; and it has now become a point of honour with educated men not only to love and admire, but to make the effort to understand. Even they desired to do this. And I think we may rejoice that the present time gives us some advantage over those days, at least in this respect.