h the champion of hedonism, who maintains that pleasure is
the supreme good in life, or rather the only good, that the prostitute
is better than the nun, for the one makes men happy, the other is
dedicated to a painful and shameful celibacy; that the law against
adultery is a sort of sacrilege; that women should be common and should
go naked; and that it is irrational to die for one's country or for any
other ideal. . . . It is noteworthy that the representative of the
Christian standpoint accepts tacitly the assumption that happiness is
the supreme good, only he places that happiness in the next life.

Valla's ideas obtained throughout a large circle in the half-century
following his death. Masuccio indulged in the most obscene mockery of
Catholic rites. Poggio wrote a book against hypocrites, attacking the
monks, and a joke-book largely at the expense of the faithful.
Machiavelli assailed the papacy with great ferocity, attributing to it
the corruption of Italian morals and the political disunion and
weakness of {51} Italy, and advocating its annihilation. [Sidenote:
Machiavelli, 1469-1530] In place of Christianity, habitually spoken of
as an exploded superstition, dangerous to the state, he would put the
patriotic cults of antiquity.

It is not strange, knowing the character of the popes, that pagan
expressions should color the writings of their courtiers. Poggio was a
papal secretary, and so was Bembo, a cardinal who refused to read
Paul's epistles for fear of corrupting his Latinity. In his exquisite
search for classical equivalents for the rude phrases of the gospel, he
referred, in a papal breve, to Christ as "Minerva sprung from the head
of Jove," and to the Holy Ghost as "the breath of the celestial
Zephyr." Conceived in the same spirit was a sermon of Inghirami heard
by Erasmus at Rome on Good Friday 1509. Couched in the purest
Ciceronian terms, while comparing the Saviour to Gurtius, Cecrops,
Aristides, Epaminondas and Iphigenia, it was mainly devoted to an
extravagant eulogy of the reigning pontiff, Julius II.

But all the Italian humanists were not pagans. There arose at
Florence, partly under the influence of the revival of Greek, partly
under that of Savonarola, a group of earnest young men who sought to
invigorate Christianity by infusing into it the doctrines of Plato.
The leaders of this Neo-Platonic Academy, Pico della Mirandola
[Sidenote: Pico della Mirandola, 1462-94] and Marsiglio Ficin