In other poems sentiments are put into the mouths of giants,
fiends, infidels, and Mohammedans which no Christian knight would
venture to utter.
Antiquity exercised an influence of another kind than that of Islam,
and this not through its religion, which was but too much like the
Catholicism of this period, but through its philosophy. Ancient
literature, now respected as something incomparable, is full of the
victory of philosophy over religious tradition. An endless number of
systems and fragments of systems were suddenly presented to the Italian
mind, not as curiosities or even as heresies, but almost with the
authority of dogmas, which had now to be reconciled rather than
discriminated. In nearly all these various opinions and doctrines a
certain kind of belief in God was implied; but taken altogether they
formed a marked contrast to the Christian faith in a Divine government
of the world. And there was one central question, which mediaeval
theology had striven in vain to solve, and which now urgently demanded
an answer from the wisdom of the ancients, namely, the relation of
Providence to the freedom or necessity of the human will. To write the
history of this question even superficially from the fourteenth century
onwards, would require a whole volume. A few hints must here suffice.
If we take Dante and his contemporaries as evidence, we shall find that
ancient philosophy first came into contact with Italian life in the
form which offered the most marked contrast to Christianity, that is to
say, Epicureanism.
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