The Renaissance
The Renaissance refers to the “rebirth” of the Classical (Greek and Roman) humanist cultural legacy, or the belief that you can reach true faith through humanism.
Beginning in 14th century
Italy and spreading throughout Europe into the 17th century,
Europeans rediscovered the quite literally lost (to Europe, at least)
literature of Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Ovid and hundreds
of other Greek and Roman authors, and in so doing rediscovered the genius and
beauty of the human mind.
Centrally, Renaissance man learned to
see humanity – the human form, intellect and experience – as an object of
brilliance and beauty, rather than of sin. This vision occurred at once in
the literal, physical sphere and in the psychological sense, in a new melding of
Greek and Judeo Christian perception: that the human form represented God’s own
beauty and His love for His most sacred creation: humankind.
We can see this reborn vision most
clearly by tracing the development of
Renaissance Humanism in Art.
The Renaissance also sparked (or
worked in tandem with) a renewed interest and ability to comprehend the
algebraic and geometric theories that had helped unlock and harness the workings
of the physical universe, so without the Renaissance there would have
been no soon following
Scientific Revolution: the Copernicus or
Galileo, and thus no Bacon or Newton.
This is not to say that most or even
many 14th-16th century Europeans or Classical
Greeks or Romans were free thinkers, or scientific thinkers, but rather that
those who attempted to do so were often allowed to do so, and that they had
the intellectual ability to do so.
Intellectual Freedom
It also means that although the Renaissance refers to an artistic rebirth
– to the literature of Dantes and Shakespeares and art of Michaelangelos and
Berninis -- this birth was not possible without a more general blossoming of
political and intellectual freedom; there is no artistic freedom without
political and religious freedom – the ability to create great art is as
much a political freedom as an intellectual one – if you cannot read what you
want, you cannot develop the ideas necessary to write new ideas…not to mention
that others must be free to read what you write.
So, while the Renaissance refers
mainly to an artistic movement, it brought with it the seeds of a rebirth in the
Athenean political concepts of liberty and democracy, predicated on reason and
the rule of law, in turn based on the right to think for oneself.
.
Consider then that one cannot read
Plato or Aristotle or Aeschylus or Cicero or Seneca – or even Homer – without
encountering the Greek and Roman Republican ideals of self governance:
republican democracy.
And consider how threatening these
were to the existing Catholic and feudal Medieval social and political order.
Yes, the Atheneans put Socrates to
death for freethinking and challenging the established order, but Plato and
Aristotle and their students were allowed to live and think and teach, and the
great playwrights like Aeschylus and Sophocles etc. could challenge the gods and
laws without being put to death. And while in the Renaissance the church
put Galileo under house arrest, banned and burned his books and threatened to
execute or excommunicate anyone who simply read or possessed his book, who here
still believes the sun and stars revolve around the earth?
As A Christian Movement
Throughout the Renaissance, the church – and after the Reformation, “the
churches”, plural – continued to play a massive central role in the civic,
intellectual and, of course, spiritual lives – these men are not atheists or
pagans, and there will be no entirely secular government until the establishment
of the United States – so the change here is that Renaissance artists no
longer see Classical humanist values as opposed to Christian values and culture.
Since we all take these artistic,
political and religious freedoms for granted, it’s hard to understand what a
radical revolution this was over the nearly thousand years that proceed it – in
order to understand the importance of Dante or Shakespeare’s genius, we need to
consider the Medieval world from which they emerged.
Since 1184 The
Inquisition had made it a crime to challenge the Church’s authority on any and
all religious dogma; those who translated or read the Bible from any language
but Latin were put to death; there was no medical science at all, and thus no
scientific concept of disease – because the very concept of Aristotelian
scientific thinking was seen as a threat to faith and Biblical revelation.
Consider, for example, that it was illegal to examine a human corpse to
understand human anatomy or examine the nature of disease. Heck, there
wasn’t even plumbing throughout Europe because the mathematical and
organizational principles necessary to create such technology had been swept
aside with the Roman Empire.
The Real Revolution: A Change
In Human Consciousness
Before this era, Michelangelo could not have sculpted the David in part because
the technical ability to create a free standing statue like this had been lost
for nearly 1000 years, as had the desire to do so, so the more important reason
is that Medieval Europeans could not see or understand the human form in
this kind of detail, and they could not even begin to grasp the human form as
an object of beauty; until the Renaissance this way of seeing the
human form would have been considered sinful and pointless (consider how this
Medieval Christian disregard for the human form is also rooted in
Neo-Platonism).
Shakespeare could not have written
Romeo And Juliette because a few hundred years earlier no Englishman would have
read a Greek or Roman tragedy, and no Englishman would have a well developed,
conscious conception and appreciation for Greek tragedy – or perhaps even of the
beauty inherent to Romantic love. He could not have written Hamlet
before his own time because, quite simply, before this time there was no one
capable of thinking as humanistically -- as deeply, openly and honestly -- about
the nature of human existence, devoid of theological-supernatural explanations.
It is not simply that Shakespeare could write with genius, it is that he
could conceive of genius -- that is that Shakespeare could conceive of a
mind as deep and skeptical as Hamlet's mind -- and that there were people who
understand and learn from this genius. In other words, it takes genius to
understand and then represent what it's like to be genius.
Copernicus (1473 –
1543), Kepler (1571-1630) and Galileo’s (1564 – 1642) disproving the Church’s
doctrine that the earth is the center of the universe doesn’t just mark the fact
that Europeans had rediscovered Greek mathematics and learned how to apply them
to the natural world: the real miracle is that these men were capable of even
thinking to challenge Aristotle and the Bible, that it even occurred to them
that such a thing was possible, that it even occurred to them that they,
themselves, mere mortal men, could look up into the sky and into their equations
and chart the heavens and explain our place in it.
And of course their books were banned
and burned and Galileo spent his remaining years under house arrest. So,
the change did not occur overnight – and for millions of people on this planet,
who still view the universe through Medieval superstition, it never occurred –
and it did not occur without a bitter and often violent struggle. But the change
begins here, in the 14th century, in, ironically, the seat of the
most powerful Medieval authority: the Catholic church.