Equally uncongenial to conservative theologians was the Neoplatonic belief in the uncreated divine spark in man, whereby divine genius could overtake the human personality and exalt man to the summits of spiritual illumination and creative power. While this conception, as well as the ancient polytheistic mythologies, provided a foundation and stimulus for the emerging Renaissance artistic genius (Michelangelo, for example, was Ficino’s student in Florence), it also undercut the Church’s traditional limitation of divinity to God alone and to the sacramental institutions of the Church. The elevation of man to a God-like status, as described by Ficino and Pico, seemed to contravene the more strictly defined orthodox Christian dichotomy between Creator and creature, and the doctrine of the Fall. Pico’s statement in the Oratio to the effect that man could freely determine his being at any level of the cosmos, including union with God, without any mention of a mediating savior, could easily be interpreted as a heretical breach of the established sacred hierarchy.
It is not surprising, then, that a papal commission condemned several of Pico’s propositions, or that the pope forbade the international public assembly Pico had planned. Yet the Church hierarchy in Rome largely tolerated and even embraced the classical revival, especially as men like the Florentine Medici made their way into papal power and began using Church resources to underwrite the enormous artistic masterworks of the Renaissance (establishing indulgences, for example, to help pay for them). The Renaissance popes were sufficiently enamored of the new cultural movement, with its classical and secular enrichments of life, that the Church’s spiritual guardianship of the larger body of Christian souls often seemed altogether neglected. It was the Reformation that would recognize all the infringements on orthodox Christian dogma that the Humanist movement was encouraging—nature as immanent divinity, pagan sensuousness and polytheism, human deification, universal religion—and would therefore call a halt to the Renaissance’s Hellenization of Christianity. Yet the Protestants would simultaneously build on those same Humanists’ criticisms of the Church and demands for spiritual and institutional reform. The new religious sensibility of the Humanists revitalized the spiritual life of Western culture just as it was decaying under the secularization of the Church and the extreme rationalism of the late medieval universities. Yet by emphasizing Hellenic and trans-Christian religious values, it was also to provoke a purist Judaeo-Christian reaction against this pagan intrusion into the traditional sacrosanct religion based solely on biblical revelation.
The scientific ramifications of the Platonic revival were no less significant than the religious. The Humanists’ anti-Aristotelianism strengthened the culture’s movement toward intellectual independence from the increasingly dogmatic authority of the Aristotelian tradition dominating the universities. More particularly, the influx of the Pythagorean theory of mathematics, in which quantitative measurement of the world could reveal a numinous order emanating from the supreme intelligence, would directly inspire Copernicus and his successors through Galileo and Newton in their efforts to penetrate nature’s mysteries. Neoplatonist mathematics, added to the rationalism and nascent empiricism of the late Scholastics, provided one of the final components necessary for the emergence of the Scientific Revolution. It was Copernicus’s and Kepler’s tenacious Neoplatonic faith that the visible universe conformed to and was illuminated by simple, precise, and elegant mathematical forms that impelled them to overthrow the complex and increasingly unworkable geocentric system of Ptolemaic astronomy.
The development of the Copernican hypothesis was also influenced by the Neoplatonists’ sacralization of the Sun, as celebrated by Ficino in particular. The intellectual force that Copernicus and especially Kepler brought to bear on transforming the Earth-centered universe received an important impetus from their Neoplatonic apprehension of the Sun as reflecting the central Godhead, with the other planets and the Earth revolving around it (or as Kepler put it, moving in adoration around it). Plato’s Republic had declared that the Sun played the same role in the visible realm as did the supreme Idea of the Good in the transcendent realm. Given the boundless gifts of light, life, and warmth that emanated from the Sun, the most brilliant and creative entity in the heavens, no other body seemed equally appropriate for the role of center of the universe. Moreover, in contrast to the finite Aristotelian universe, the infinite nature of the Neoplatonic supreme Godhead, and its infinite fecundity in creation, suggested a corresponding expansion of the universe that further mediated the break from the traditional architectural structure of the medieval cosmos. Accordingly, Nicholas of Cusa, the erudite Church cardinal and Neoplatonic philosopher-mathematician of the mid-fifteenth century, proposed a moving Earth as part of a centerless (or omnicentered) infinite Neoplatonic universe.
And so the Humanists’ Platonic revival extended momentously into the creation of the modern era, not only through its inspiration of the Renaissance proper—with the latter’s artistic achievements, philosophical syncretism, and cult of human genius—but also through its direct and indirect consequences for the Reformation and Scientific Revolution. With the recovery of the direct sources of the Platonic line, the medieval trajectory was in a sense complete. Something like the ancient Greek balance and tension between Aristotle and Plato, between reason and imagination, immanence and transcendence, nature and spirit, external world and interior psyche, was again emerging in Western culture—a polarity further complicated and intensified by Christianity itself with its own internal dialectic. From this unstable but fertile balance would issue forth the next age.
At the Threshold
In the course of the long medieval era, a potent maturation had occurred within the Christian matrix on every front—philosophical, psychological, religious, scientific, political, artistic. By the later high Middle Ages, this development was beginning to challenge the limits of that matrix. Extraordinary social and economic growth had provided an ample basis for such cultural dynamism, which was further provoked by the consolidation of political authority by the secular monarchies in competition with that of the Church. Out of the feudal order had grown towns, guilds, leagues, states, international commerce, a new merchant class, a mobile peasantry, new contractual and legal structures, parliaments, corporate liberties, and early forms of constitutional and representative government. Important technological advances were made and disseminated. Scholarship and learning progressed, both in and out of the universities. Human experience in the West was reaching new levels of sophistication, complexity, and expansiveness.
The character of this evolution was visible on a philosophical level in Aquinas’s affirmation of the human being’s essential dynamic autonomy, of the natural world’s ontological significance, and of the value of empirical knowledge, all as intrinsic elements in the unfolding of the divine mystery. More generally, it was evidenced in the Scholastics’ long and polemical development of naturalism and rationalism, and in their encyclopedic summae integrating Greek philosophy and science into the Christian framework. It was visible in the unparalleled architectural achievement of the Gothic cathedrals and in Dante’s great Christian epic. It was conspicuous in the early experimental science advanced by Bacon and Grosseteste, in Ockham’s assertion of nominalism and the bifurcation of reason and faith, and in Buridan’s and Oresme’s critical advances in Aristotelian science. It could be seen in the rise of lay mysticism and private religiosity, in the new realism and romanticism in society and the arts, in the secularization of the sacred found in the celebration of redemptive amor by the troubadors and poets. It could be measured by the emergence of sensibilities as complex, subtle, and aesthetically refined as that of Petrarch, and especially in his articulation of a highly individualized temperament at once religious and secular in orientation. It was evident in the Humanists’ revival of classical letters, their recovery of the Platonic tradition, and their establishment in Europe of an autonomous secular education for the first time since the fall of the Roman Empire. And perhaps most tellingly,
that evolution was visible in the new Promethean image of man proclaimed by Pico and Ficino. A new and growing independence of spirit was everywhere apparent, expressed in often divergent but always expanding directions. Slowly, painfully, but wondrously and with ineluctable force, the Western mind was opening to a new universe.
The medieval gestation of European culture had approached a critical threshold, beyond which it would no longer be containable by the old structures. Indeed, the thousand-year maturation of the West was about to assert itself in a series of enormous cultural convulsions that would give birth to the modern world.
V
The Modern World View
The modern world view was the outcome of an extraordinary convergence of events, ideas, and figures which, for all their conflicting variety, engendered a profoundly compelling vision of the universe and of the human being’s place in it—a vision radically novel in character and paradoxical in its consequences. Those same factors also reflected, and wrought, a fundamental change in the Western character. To understand the historical emergence of the modern mind, we shall now examine the complexly intermingled cultural epochs known as the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Scientific Revolution.
The Renaissance
The phenomenon of the Renaissance lay as much in the sheer diversity of its expressions as in their unprecedented quality. Within the span of a single generation, Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael produced their masterworks, Columbus discovered the New World, Luther rebelled against the Catholic Church and began the Reformation, and Copernicus hypothesized a heliocentric universe and commenced the Scientific Revolution. Compared with his medieval predecessors, Renaissance man appeared to have suddenly vaulted into virtually superhuman status. Man was now capable of penetrating and reflecting nature’s secrets, in art as well as science, with unparalleled mathematical sophistication, empirical precision, and numinous aesthetic power. He had immensely expanded the known world, discovered new continents, and rounded the globe. He could defy traditional authorities and assert a truth based on his own judgment. He could appreciate the riches of classical culture and yet also feel himself breaking beyond the ancient boundaries to reveal entirely new realms. Polyphonic music, tragedy and comedy, poetry, painting, architecture, and sculpture all achieved new levels of complexity and beauty. Individual genius and independence were widely in evidence. No domain of knowledge, creativity, or exploration seemed beyond man’s reach.
With the Renaissance, human life in this world seemed to hold an immediate inherent value, an excitement and existential significance, that balanced or even displaced the medieval focus on an afterworldly spiritual destiny. Man no longer appeared so inconsequential relative to God, the Church, or nature. On many fronts, in diverse realms of human activity, Pico’s proclamation of man’s dignity seemed fulfilled. From its beginnings with Petrarch, Boccaccio, Bruni, and Alberti, through Erasmus, More, Machiavelli, and Montaigne, to its final expressions in Shakespeare, Cervantes, Bacon, and Galileo, the Renaissance did not cease producing new paragons of human achievement. Such a prodigious development of human consciousness and culture had not been seen since the ancient Greek miracle at the very birth of Western civilization. Western man was indeed reborn.
Yet it would be a deep mis judgment to perceive the emergence of the Renaissance as all light and splendor, for it arrived in the wake of a series of unmitigated disasters and thrived in the midst of continuous upheaval. Beginning in the mid-fourteenth century, the black plague swept through Europe and destroyed a third of the continent’s population, fatally undermining the balance of economic and cultural elements that had sustained the high medieval civilization. Many believed that the wrath of God had come upon the world. The Hundred Years’ War between England and France was an interminably ruinous conflict, while Italy was ravaged by repeated invasions and internecine struggles. Pirates, bandits, and mercenaries were ubiquitous. Religious strife grew to international proportions. Severe economic depression was nearly universal for decades. The universities were sclerotic. New diseases entered Europe through its ports and took their toll. Black magic and devil worship flourished, as did group flagellation, the dance of death in cemeteries, the black mass, the Inquisition, tortures and burnings at the stake. Ecclesiastical conspiracies were routine, and included such events as a papally backed assassination in front of the Florentine cathedral altar at High Mass on Easter Sunday. Murder, rape, and pillage were often daily realities, famine and pestilence annual perils. The Turkish hordes threatened to overwhelm Europe at any moment. Apocalyptic expectations abounded. And the Church itself, the West’s fundamental cultural institution, seemed to many the very center of decadent corruption, its structure and purpose devoid of spiritual integrity. It was against this backdrop of massive cultural decay, violence, and death that the “rebirth” of the Renaissance took place.
As with the medieval cultural revolution several centuries earlier, technical inventions played a pivotal role in the making of the new era. Four in particular (all with Oriental precursors) had been brought into widespread use in the West by this time, with immense cultural ramifications: the magnetic compass, which permitted the navigational feats that opened the globe to European exploration; gunpowder, which contributed to the demise of the old feudal order and the ascent of nationalism; the mechanical clock, which brought about a decisive change in the human relationship to time, nature, and work, separating and freeing the structure of human activities from the dominance of nature’s rhythms; and the printing press, which produced a tremendous increase in learning, made available both ancient classics and modern works to an ever-broadening public, and eroded the monopoly on learning long held by the clergy.
All of these inventions were powerfully modernizing and ultimately secularizing in their effects. The artillery-supported rise of separate but internally cohesive nation-states signified not only the overthrow of the medieval feudal structures but also the empowerment of secular forces against the Catholic Church. With parallel effect in the realm of thought, the printing press allowed the rapid dissemination of new and often revolutionary ideas throughout Europe. Without it, the Reformation would have been limited to a relatively minor theological dispute in a remote German province, and the Scientific Revolution, with its dependence on international communication among many scientists, would have been altogether impossible. Moreover, the spread of the printed word and growing literacy contributed to a new cultural ethos marked by increasingly individual and private, noncommunal forms of communication and experience, thereby encouraging the growth of individualism. Silent reading and solitary reflection helped free the individual from traditional ways of thinking, and from collective control of thinking, with individual readers now having private access to a multiplicity of other perspectives and forms of experience.
Similarly progressive in its consequences was the development of the mechanical clock, which with its precisely articulated system of wheels and gears became the paradigm of modern machines, accelerating the advance of mechanical invention and machine building of all kinds. Equally important, the new mechanical triumph provided a basic conceptual model and metaphor for the new era’s emerging science—indeed, for the entire modern mind—profoundly shaping the modern view of the cosmos and nature, of the human being, of the ideal society, even of God. Likewise, the global explorations made possible by the magnetic compass greatly impelled intellectual innovation, reflecting and encouraging the new scientific investigation of the natural world and further affirming the West’s sense of being at the heroic frontier of civilized history. By unexpectedly revealing the errors and ignorance of the ancient geographers, the discoveries of the explorers gave the modern intellect a new sense of its own competence and even superiority over the previously unsurpassed masters of antiquity—undermining, by implication, all traditional authorities. Among these discredited geographers was Ptolemy, whose status in astronomy was therefore affected as well. The navigational expeditions in turn requir
ed more accurate astronomical knowledge and more proficient astronomers, out of whose number would emerge Copernicus. Discoveries of new continents brought new possibilities for economic and political expansion, and hence the radical transformation of European social structures. With those discoveries came also the encounter with new cultures, religions, and ways of life, introducing into the European awareness a new spirit of skeptical relativism concerning the absoluteness of its own traditional assumptions. The West’s horizons—geographical, mental, social, economic, political—were changing and expanding in unprecedented ways.
Concurrent with these advances was an important psychological development in which the European character, beginning in the peculiar political and cultural atmosphere of Renaissance Italy, underwent a unique and portentous transformation. The Italian city-states of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries—Florence, Milan, Venice, Urbino, and others—were in many ways the most advanced urban centers in Europe. Energetic commercial enterprise, a prosperous Mediterranean trade, and continual contact with the older civilizations of the East presented them with an unusually concentrated inflow of economic and cultural wealth. In addition, the weakening of the Roman papacy in its struggles with the incohesive Holy Roman Empire and with the rising nation-states of the north had produced a political condition in Italy of marked fluidity. The Italian city-states’ small size, their independence from externally sanctioned authority, and their commercial and cultural vitality all provided a political stage upon which a new spirit of bold, creative, and often ruthless individualism could flourish. Whereas in earlier times, the life of the state was defined by inherited structures of power and law imposed by tradition or higher authority, now individual ability and deliberate political action and thought carried the most weight. The state itself was seen as something to be comprehended and manipulated by human will and intelligence, a political understanding making the Italian city-states forerunners of the modern state.
Passion of the Western Mind Page 29