Passion of the Western Mind

by Tarnas, Richard

  This new value placed on individualism and personal genius reinforced a similar characteristic of the Italian Humanists, whose sense of personal worth also rested on individual capacity, and whose ideal was similarly that of the emancipated man of many-sided genius. The medieval Christian ideal in which personal identity was largely absorbed in the collective Christian body of souls faded in favor of the more pagan heroic mode—the individual man as adventurer, genius, and rebel. Realization of the protean self was best achieved not through saintly withdrawal from the world but through a life of strenuous action in the service of the city-state, in scholarly and artistic activity, in commercial enterprise and social intercourse. Old dichotomies were now comprehended in a larger unity: activity in the world as well as contemplation of eternal truths; devotion to state, family, and self as well as to God and Church; physical pleasure as well as spiritual happiness; prosperity as well as virtue. Forsaking the ideal of monastic poverty, Renaissance man embraced the enrichments of life afforded by personal wealth, and Humanist scholars and artists flourished in the new cultural climate subsidized by the Italian commercial and aristocratic elites.

  The combined influences of political dynamism, economic wealth, broad scholarship, sensuous art, and a special intimacy with ancient and eastern Mediterranean cultures all encouraged a new and expansively secular spirit in the Italian ruling class, extending into the inner sanctum of the Vatican. In the eyes of the pious a certain paganism and amorality was becoming pervasive in Italian life. Such was visible not only in the calculated barbarities and intrigues of the political arena, but also in the unabashed worldliness of Renaissance man’s interests in nature, knowledge, beauty, and luxury for their own sakes. It was thus from its origins in the dynamic culture of Renaissance Italy that there developed a distinctive new Western personality. Marked by individualism, secularity, strength of will, multiplicity of interest and impulse, creative innovation, and a willingness to defy traditional limitations on human activity, this spirit soon began to spread across Europe, providing the lineaments of the modern character.

  Yet for all the secularism of the age, in a quite tangible sense the Roman Catholic Church itself attained a pinnacle of glory in the Renaissance. Saint Peter’s Basilica, the Sistine Chapel, the Stanza della Segnatura in the Vatican all stand as astonishing monuments to the Church’s final moments as undisputed sovereign of Western culture. Here the full grandeur of the Catholic Church’s self-conception was articulated, encompassing Genesis and the biblical drama (the Sistine ceiling), classical Greek philosophy and science (the School of Athens), poetry and the creative arts (the Parnassus), all culminating in the theology and supreme pantheon of Roman Catholic Christianity (La Disputa del Sacramento, The Triumph of the Church). The procession of the centuries, the history of the Western soul, was here given immortal embodiment. Under the guidance of the inspired albeit thoroughly unpriestlike Pope Julius II, protean artists like Raphael, Bramante, and Michelangelo painted, sculpted, designed, and constructed works of art of unsurpassed beauty and power to celebrate the majestic Catholic vision. Thus the Mother Church, mediatrix, between God and man, matrix of Western culture, now assembled and integrated all her diverse elements: Judaism and Hellenism, Scholasticism and Humanism, Platonism and Aristotelianism, pagan myth and biblical revelation. With Renaissance artistic imagery as its language, a new pictorial Summa was written, integrating the dialectical components of Western culture in a transcendent synthesis. It was as if the Church, subconsciously aware of the wrenching fate about to befall it, called forth from itself its most exalted cultural self-understanding and found artists of seemingly divine stature to incarnate that image.

  Yet this efflorescence of the Catholic Church in the midst of an era that was so decidedly embracing the secular and the present world was the kind of paradox that was altogether characteristic of the Renaissance. For the unique position in cultural history held by the Renaissance as a whole derives not least from its simultaneous balance and synthesis of many opposites: Christian and pagan, modern and classical, secular and sacred, art and science, science and religion, poetry and politics. The Renaissance was both an age to itself and a transition. At once medieval and modern, it was still highly religious (Ficino, Michelangelo, Erasmus, More, Savonarola, Luther, Loyola, Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross), yet undeniably worldly (Machiavelli, Cellini, Castiglione, Montaigne, Bacon, the Medici and Borgias, most of the Renaissance popes). At the same time that the scientific sensibility arose and flourished, religious passions surged as well, and often in inextricable combination.

  The Renaissance integration of contraries had been foreshadowed in the Petrarchian ideal of docta pietas, and was now fulfilled in religious scholars like Erasmus and his friend Thomas More. With the Christian Humanists of the Renaissance, irony and restraint, worldly activity and classical erudition served the Christian cause in ways the medieval era had not witnessed. A literate and ecumenical evangelism here seemed to replace the dogmatic pieties of a more primitive age. A critical religious intellectuality sought to supersede naive religious superstition. The philosopher Plato and the apostle Paul were brought together and synthesized to produce a new philosophia Christi.

  But perhaps it was the art of the Renaissance that best expressed the era’s contraries and unity. In the early Quattrocento, only one in twenty paintings could be found with a nonreligious subject. A century later, there were five times as many. Even inside the Vatican, paintings of nudes and pagan deities now faced those of the Madonna and Christ Child. The human body was celebrated in its beauty, formal harmony, and proportion, yet often in the service of religious subjects or as a revelation of God’s creative wisdom. Renaissance art was devoted to the exact imitation of nature, and was technically capable of an unprecedented naturalistic realism, yet was also singularly effective in rendering a sublime numinosity, depicting spiritual and mythic beings and even contemporary human figures with a certain ineffable grace and formal perfection. Conversely, that capacity for rendering the numinous would have been impossible without the technical innovations—geometrical mathematization of space, linear perspective, aerial perspective, anatomical knowledge, chiaroscuro, sfumato—that developed from the striving for perceptual realism and empirical accuracy. In turn, these achievements in painting and drawing propelled later scientific advances in anatomy and medicine, and foreshadowed the Scientific Revolution’s global mathematization of the physical world. It was not peripheral to the emergence of the modern outlook that Renaissance art depicted a world of rationally related solids in a unified space seen from a single objective viewpoint.

  The Renaissance thrived on a determined “decompartmentalization,” maintaining no strict divisions between different realms of human knowledge or experience. Leonardo was the prime exemplar—as committed to the search for knowledge as for beauty, artist of many mediums who was continuously and voraciously involved in scientific research of wide range. Leonardo’s development and exploitation of the empirical eye for grasping the external world with fuller awareness and new precision were as much in the service of scientific insight as of artistic representation, with both goals jointly pursued in his “science of painting.” His art revealed an uncanny spiritual expressiveness that accompanied, and was nurtured by, extreme technical accuracy of depiction. It was uniquely characteristic of the Renaissance that it produced the man who not only painted the Last Supper and The Virgin of the Rocks, but also articulated in his notebooks the three fundamental principles—empiricism, mathematics, and mechanics—that would dominate modern scientific thinking.

  So too did Copernicus and Kepler, with Neoplatonic and Pythagorean motivations, seek solutions to problems in astronomy that would satisfy aesthetic imperatives, a strategy which led them to the heliocentric universe. No less significant was the strong religious motivation, usually combined with Platonic themes, impelling most of the major figures in the Scientific Revolution through Newton. For implicit in all these activities was the h
alf-inarticulate notion of a distant mythical golden age when all things had been known—the Garden of Eden, ancient classical times, a past era of great sages. Mankind’s fall from this primal state of enlightenment and grace had brought about a drastic loss of knowledge. Recovery of knowledge was therefore endowed with religious significance. And so once again, just as in classical Athens the religion, art, and myth of the ancient Greeks met and interacted with the new and equally Greek spirit of rationalism and science, this paradoxical conjunction and balance was attained in the Renaissance.

  Although the Renaissance was in many senses a direct outgrowth of the rich and burgeoning culture of the high Middle Ages, by all accounts, between the mid-fifteenth and early seventeenth centuries, an unmistakable quantum leap was made in the cultural evolution of the West. The various contributing factors can be recognized in retrospect and listed—the rediscovery of antiquity, the commercial vitality, the city-state personality, the technical inventions, and so forth. But when all these “causes” of the Renaissance have been enumerated, one still senses that the essential thrust of the Renaissance was something larger than any of these factors, than all of them combined. Instead, the historical record suggests there was concurrently on many fronts an emphatic emergence of a new consciousness—expansive, rebellious, energetic and creative, individualistic, ambitious and often unscrupulous, curious, self-confident, committed to this life and this world, open-eyed and skeptical, inspired and inspirited—and that this emergence had its own raison d’être, was propelled by some greater and more subsuming force than any combination of political, social, technological, religious, philosophical, or artistic factors. It was not accidental to the character of the Renaissance (nor, perhaps, unrelated to its new sense of artistic perspective) that, while medieval scholars saw history divided into two periods, before and after Christ, with their own time only vaguely separated from the Roman era of Christ’s birth, Renaissance historians achieved a decisively new perspective on the past: history was perceived and defined for the first time as a tripartite structure—ancient, medieval, modern—thus sharply differentiating the classical and medieval eras, with the Renaissance itself at the vanguard of the new age.

  The events and figures converged on the Renaissance stage with amazing rapidity, even simultaneity. Columbus and Leonardo were both born in the same half decade (1450–55) that brought the development of the Gutenberg press, the fall of Constantinople with the resulting influx of Greek scholars to Italy, and the end of the Hundred Years’ War through which France and England each forged its national consciousness. The same two decades (1468–88) that saw the Florentine Academy’s Neoplatonic revival at its height during the reign of Lorenzo the Magnificent also saw the births of Copernicus, Luther, Castiglione, Raphael, Dürer, Michelangelo, Giorgione, Machiavelli, Cesare Borgia, Zwingli, Pizarro, Magellan, and More. In the same period, Aragon and Castille were joined by the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella to form the nation of Spain, the Tudors succeeded to the throne in England, Leonardo began his artistic career with his painting of the angel in Verrocchio’s Baptism of Christ, then his own Adoration of the Magi, Botticelli painted Primavera and The Birth of Venus, Ficino wrote the Theologia Platonica and published the first complete translation of Plato in the West, Erasmus received his early Humanist education in Holland, and Pico della Mirandola composed the manifesto of Renaissance Humanism, the Oration on the Dignity of Man. More than “causes” were operative here. A spontaneous and irreducible revolution of consciousness was taking place, affecting virtually every aspect of Western culture. Amidst high drama and painful convulsions, modern man was born in the Renaissance, “trailing clouds of glory.”

  The Reformation

  It was when the spirit of Renaissance individualism reached the realm of theology and religious conviction within the Church, in the person of the German Augustinian monk Martin Luther, that there erupted in Europe the momentous Protestant Reformation. The Renaissance had accommodated both classical culture and Christianity in one expansive if unsystematic vision. But the continued moral deterioration of the papacy in the south now encountered a new surge of rigorous religiosity in the north. The relaxed cultural syncretism displayed by the Renaissance Church’s embrace of Greco-Roman pagan culture (including the immense expense of patronage this embrace demanded) helped precipitate the collapse of the Church’s absolute religious authority. Armed with the thunderous moral power of an Old Testament prophet, Luther defiantly confronted the Roman Catholic papacy’s patent neglect of the original Christian faith revealed in the Bible. Sparked by Luther’s rebellion, an insuperable cultural reaction swept through the sixteenth century, decisively reasserting the Christian religion while simultaneously shattering the unity of Western Christendom.

  The proximate cause of the Reformation was the papacy’s attempt to finance the architectural and artistic glories of the High Renaissance by the theologically dubious means of selling spiritual indulgences. Tetzel, the traveling friar whose sale of indulgences in Germany provoked Luther in 1517 to post his Ninety-five Theses, had been so authorized by the Medici Pope Leo X to raise money for building Saint Peter’s Basilica. An indulgence was the remission of punishment for a sin after guilt had been sacramentally forgiven—a Church practice influenced by the pre-Christian Germanic custom of commuting the physical penalty for a crime to a money payment. To grant such an indulgence, the Church drew from the treasury of merits accumulated by the good works of the saints, and in return the recipient made a contribution to the Church. A voluntary and popular arrangement, the practice allowed the Church to raise money for financing crusades and building cathedrals and hospitals. At first applied only to penalties imposed by the Church in this life, by Luther’s time indulgences were being granted to remit penalties imposed by God in the afterlife, including immediate release from purgatory. With indulgences effecting even the remission of sins, the sacrament of penance itself was seemingly compromised.

  But beyond the matter of indulgences lay more fundamental sources of the Protestant revolution—the long-developing political secularism of the Church hierarchy, undermining its spiritual integrity while embroiling it in diplomatic and military struggles; the prevalence of both deep piety and poverty among the Church faithful, in contrast to an often irreligious but socially and economically privileged clergy; the rise of monarchical power, nationalism, and local Germanic insurgency against the universal ambitions of the Roman papacy and the Habsburgs’ Holy Roman Empire. Yet the more immediate cause, the Church’s expensive patronage of high culture, does illuminate a deeper factor behind the Reformation—namely, the anti-Hellenic spirit with which Luther sought to purify Christianity and return it to its pristine biblical foundation. For the Reformation was not least a purist “Judaic” reaction against the Hellenic (and Roman) impulse of Renaissance culture, of Scholastic philosophy, and of much postapostolic Christianity in general. Yet perhaps the most fundamental element in the genesis of the Reformation was the emerging spirit of rebellious, self-determining individualism, and particularly the growing impulse for intellectual and spiritual independence, which had now developed to that crucial point where a potently critical stand could be sustained against the West’s highest cultural authority, the Roman Catholic Church.

  Luther desperately sought for a gracious God’s redemption in the face of so much evidence to the contrary, evidence both of God’s damning judgment and of Luther’s own sinfulness. He failed to find that grace in himself or in his own works, nor did he find it in the Church—not in its sacraments, not in its ecclesiastical hierarchy, and assuredly not in its papal indulgences. It was, finally, the faith in God’s redeeming power as revealed through Christ in the Bible, and that alone, which rendered Luther’s experience of salvation, and upon that exclusive rock he built his new church of a reformed Christianity. Erasmus, by contrast, the devoutly critical Humanist, wished to save the Church’s unity and mission by reforming it from within. But the Church hierarchy, absorbed in other
matters, remained intransigently insensitive to such needs, while Luther, with equal intransigence, declared the necessity of complete schism and independence from an institution he now viewed as the seat of the Antichrist.

  Pope Leo X considered Luther’s revolt merely another “monk’s quarrel,” and long delayed any response adequate to the problem. When, almost three years after the Ninety-five Theses were posted, Luther finally received the papal bull to submit, he publicly burned it. At the ensuing meeting of the imperial Diet, the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor Charles V declared himself certain that a single friar could not be right in denying the validity of all Christianity during the previous thousand years. Wishing to preserve the unity of the Christian religion, yet faced with Luther’s obstinate refusal to recant, he placed an imperial ban on Luther as a heretic. But empowered by the rebellious German princes and knights, Luther’s personal theological insurgency rapidly expanded to an international upheaval. In retrospect, the post-Constantinian welding of the Christian religion to the ancient Roman state had proved to be a two-edged sword, contributing both to the Church’s cultural ascendance and to its eventual decline. The overarching cultural union maintained in Europe for a thousand years by the Catholic Church was now irrevocably split asunder.

  But it was Luther’s personal religious dilemma that was the sine qua non of the Reformation. In his acute sense of alienation and terror before the Omnipotent, Luther saw it was the whole man who was corrupt and needed God’s forgiveness, not just particular sins that one by one could be erased by proper Church-defined actions. The particular sins were but symptoms of a more fundamental sickness in man’s soul that required healing. One could not purchase redemption, step by step, through good works or through the legalisms of penance or other sacraments, not to mention the infamous indulgences. Only Christ could save the whole man, and only man’s faith in Christ could justify man before God. Only thus could the terrible righteousness of an angry God, who justly damns sinners to eternal perdition, be transformed into the merciful righteousness of a forgiving God, who freely rewards the faithful with eternal bliss. As Luther exultantly discovered in Paul’s Letter to the Romans, man did not earn salvation; rather, God gave it freely to those who have faith. The source of that saving faith was Holy Scripture, where God’s mercy revealed itself in Christ’s crucifixion for mankind. There alone could the Christian believer find the means to his salvation. The Catholic Church—with its cynical marketplace practice of claiming to be dispensing God’s grace, distributing the merits of the saints, forgiving men’s sins, and releasing them from debts owed in the afterlife, in return for money garnered for its own often irreligious purposes, meanwhile claiming papal infallibility—could only be an impostor. The Church could no longer be reverenced as the sacred medium of Christian truth.