doppelgänger, Franciscus, and his Christian intellectual predecessor Augustine,
who in the dialogue was both inspirer and sometimes castigator.
Cardinal Bessarion (1403–72), a Byzantine humanist theologian and a
Greek convert to Catholicism, felt a great reanimating intensity similar to
Petrarch’s. Bessarion had prized the lasting Greek voices from the early church
before, but after the fall of Constantinople he knew they were in peril, too. And
so he sent his scribe, with the wonderful name Michael Apostolius, in search of
any manuscripts he could procure. Bessarion explains his actions in a letter to
the Venetian senate:‘Books ring with the voices of the wise. They are full of the
lessons of history, full of life, law and piety. They live, speak and debate with
us; they teach, advise and comfort us; they reveal matters which are furthest
from our memories, and set them, as it were, before our eyes. Such is their
power, worth and splendor, such their inspiration, that we should all be
uneducated brutes if there were no books. We should have hardly any record
of the past, no example to guide us, no knowledge whatever of the affairs of
this world or the next.’^37 Bessarion describes these salvaged books as mouth-
pieces to stave off speechlessness, and later he speaks of the texts as‘urns
holding the bodies of the sages’. John Milton, inAreopagitica, that great
treatise on freedom of the press, employs a similar metaphor, but one even
stronger in its implications:‘For books are not absolutely dead things, but doe
contain a potencie of life in them to be as active as that soule whose progeny
they are; nay, they do preserve as in a violl the purest efficacie and extraction of
that living intellect that bred them.’^38 So the author may no longer be living,
but through the medium of writing her or his intelligence is not only pre-
served, but all the more powerfully distilled.
Jürgen Pieters explores these tropes and hopes for revitalizing a long-dead
intellectual hero in his studySpeaking with the Dead.^39 And writers still do this
today, if usually more with a spirit of comic indulgence than humanist
veneration. For example, in an interview, the novelist Jeffrey Eugenides is
asked which three authors he would invite to a dinner party, and he provides a
wonderfully colourful play-by-play: when Shakespeare hears that Tolstoy will
be there, he says,‘Hmm, I’m busy that night.’And Tolstoy drops out when he
hears Milan Kundera will be there. The host manages to get Kafka and Joyce to
attend instead. When the waiter asks about food allergies, Kafka has a written
list already prepared. Joyce tells Eugenides that he is reading the living
novelist’s new book.‘Oh?’Eugenides says.‘Yes,’says Joyce. And that is all
he has to say about it there. I hear, in that terseness, the creative competition
(^37) ‘The Origins of St Mark’s Library: Cardinal Bessarion’s Gift, 1468’, reproduced in David
Chambers, Brian Pullan, and Jennifer Fletcher (eds),Venice: A Documentary History(Toronto,
Buffalo, NY, and London: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 357–8.
(^38) Milton,Areopagitica, ed. John W. Hales (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1886), 5.
(^39) Jürgen Pieters,Speaking with the Dead: Explorations in Literature and History(Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2005).
Christian Humanism’s Legacy in Renaissance Poetry 185