Rabelais and the Renaissance Idea of Progress Author(s): Abraham C. Keller Source: Renaissance News, Vol. 2, No.

2 (Summer, 1949), pp. 21-23 Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Renaissance Society of America Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2858254 . Accessed: 07/11/2013 07:26
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RENAISSANCE NEWS
A quarterly newsletter published by Dartmouth College Library for the American Council of Learned Societies
FREDERICK W. STERNFELD, editor VERNON HALL, JR. RAY NASH

Address all communicationsto the editor, P.O. Box 832, Hanover, N.H. Annual subscription:domestic $i.oo, Canada and foreign $1.25
VOL. II SUMMER I949 No.
2

IDEA OF PROGRESS: RABELAIS IDEA OF PROGRESS: ELIZABETHANS

page

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The foregoing are abstractsof papersto be delivered before the Renaissance Section of the Modern Language Association at Stanford University on September7-8
EINSTEIN)S 'MADRIGAL): A REVIEW 25 28 29 AND EUROPEAN NEWS 3I REGIONAL CONFERENCES LIBRARIES PROJECTS

HISTORY AND LITERATURE MUSIC VISUAL ARTS LATIN TRANSLATIONS 37

R abelais and the Renaissance Idea of Progress

BY ABRAHAM C. KELLER ing to terms of two divergent points of view in the sixteenth century, the humanists'belief in the past and the artisans'belief in the future. That a belief in the progress of knowledge played a significant role in the thought of certain fifteenth and sixteenth century precursorsof the scientific movement has been well established. It seems equally certain that the idea of progress, though increasingly common among men who were engaged in the practical arts, had little appeal for most of the
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HE genesisof Rabelais' of progress the comillustrates conception

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humanists of the time of Erasmus and before, preoccupiedas they were with classicallearning as the ne plus ultra. By the end of the sixteenth century the progressive view, which had received its main impetus from the side of the technological writers, had become part of the intellectual equipmentof many classicallyeducated men, and the scientificmovement, heralded by Bacon and exemplified by Gilbert and Galileo, was in full swing. But the concurrence of technology and classicalscholarshipwas a slow process, and it is unlikely that an exact date for it can be fixed or a writer named in whom it first occurred. Thus the example of Rabelaisis intended more as illustrationthan to establishany primacy. In Pantagruel and Gargantua (1532, 1534) Rabelais displayed the enthusiasmand reverence for antiquitywhich were typical of the humanists from Petrarch to Erasmus and Bude. His praiseof the advanced state of learning in his own day as compared to that of the period of "Gothic barbarism"was based, not upon a belief in any steady increase of knowledge, but upon the conviction that men had drawn closer than ever before to the wisdom of the ancients. In the last three books of his work (15461564), however, though never ceasing to draw heavily upon his classical erudition, Rabelaisshowed, insteadof his former reverence, a high degree of skepticismand independence. Whereas in the first books he could pay no higher compliment to a character'seloquence or wisdom than to liken it to that of the ancients, in the last books he proclaimedthat the ancients left much for modern men to do-in making new discoveriesas well as in building upon ancient knowledge by finding new applicationsof old formulas. In this view, and in his enthusiasm for material advance, Rabelais departed from traditional humanism and, especially, undermined the Senecan antagonismbetween wisdom and ingenuity. To account for Rabelais' changed position vis-a-vis classical authority and for his statement of an idea of progress is to examine at once the intellectual events of the period 1534-1546 and the elements of Rabelais' training and inclinationswhich made him receptiveto the progressivecurrent. In this period, which saw Rabelais turning sharply away from Platonism-perhaps as a result of his quarrel with the Lyon group on the woman question,-and which saw the passing of his chief classical mentors, Erasmus and Bude, there were publishedin Europe a number of importantbooks which, on the one hand, stated the idea of the progress of knowledge in much the same terms that Rabelais was to adopt, and on the other hand gave proof of the possibilityof advancing beyond the learning of the ancients. The progressiveformulations of certain writers of the new generation and the scientific achievements of the 1530S and 1540s, e.g. in the medical sciences, where Rabelais'professionlay, pressed hard upon the traditionalhumanisticview of authority.
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Above all, Rabelais' training and inclinations made him appreciative of these movements and rendered him receptive to the un-humanistic standard of values implied in them. His attachment to medieval ways of thought-strong in spite of himself,-his closeness to, and thorough acquaintancewith, manual trades (already visible in the period I532-34), and his study and practiceof medicine, where the barriersbetween scholar and practitionerhad already been largely broken (notably at Montpellier, where Rabelaisreceived his degrees), made him a ready rebel against the circumscribed classicalteachings, as much as these may at first have exercised an expansiveand liberating influence. This is not to say that even in his late books Rabelais departed from the ancient masters. But the new use to which he put them as vehicles for his own ideas, and his obvious leaning to Stoicism, which provided classical confirmation for his new dynamic view of the growth of knowledge -these considerationsbring Rabelais close to Montaigne's generation of independent French thinkers, and provide an example, before Leroy, Bodin, Gilbert, and Bacon, of the union, on a philosophicallevel, of humanistic learning with the practical arts whence the idea of progress derived a large measure of its force.
UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON

T'he Idea of Progress: Some Elizabethan Considerations

BY ERNEST A. STRATHMANN

only in terms of J. B. Bury's strict definition of that idea as "a theory which involves a synthesisof the past and a prophecyof the future," the results are likely to be no more fruitful than Bury found them. By these terms, a complete graspof the idea of progressrequires"an interpretation of history which regards men as slowly advancing . . . in a definite and desirable direction, and infers that this progress will continue indefinitely." *

IF we investigateElizabethan thought on the nature of human progress

Admittedly many Elizabethan concepts were unfavorable to the idea of progress. The Fall of Man accounted not only for original sin but also for intellectual and physical imperfections. It was a common belief, supportedby the propheciesof Daniel and other religious teachings, that
* The Idea of Progress ( 928, p. 5.)

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