The Cave and the Light

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by Arthur Herman


  26. Especially the Gnostics. See Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (New York: Vintage Books, 1979).

  27. Dionysius the Areopagite, Celestial Hierarchy.

  28. Plato, The Republic, trans. Desmond Lee, 2nd ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), VI, 517c.

  29. Simson, Gothic Cathedral, 53–55.

  30. Dionysius himself almost certainly knew nothing about Saint Augustine or Plotinus’s theory of divine illumination. He came out of the Neoplatonist tradition of the Eastern Church derived from figures like Origen and Saint Gregory of Nyssa. See John Dillon, The Great Tradition: Further Studies in the Development of Platonism and Early Christianity (Brookfield Vt.: Ashgate, 1997).

  31. Simson, Gothic Cathedral, 143–44.

  32. As noted by Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974), 112.

  33. Conrad Rudolph, Artistic Change at Saint Denis (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), 8–11.

  34. Quoted in Gordon Strachan, Sacred Geometry, Sacred Space (Edinburgh: Floris, 2003), 52.

  35. Ibid., 45.

  36. A. Katzenellenbogen, The Sculptural Programs of Chartres Cathedral (New York: Norton, 1964), 27.

  37. D. W. Robertson, Abelard and Heloise (New York: Dial Press, 1972).

  38. John Sarracenus to Abbot Odo, Suger’s successor; quoted in Simson, Gothic Cathedral, 103.

  39. This was the assertion of a Pseudo-Dionysius disciple named Maximus the Confessor. On his influence on Saint Bernard, see Étienne Gilson, The Mystical Theology of Saint Bernard (1940; repr., Kalamazoo, Mich.: Cistercian Publications, 1990).

  40. Quoted in Richard Viladesau, Theological Aesthetics: God in Imagination, Beauty, and Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 109–10.

  41. Bernard’s initial reaction was less than enthusiastic.

  42. Simson, Gothic Cathedral.

  43. Francis Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology: The Timaeus of Plato (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1975).

  44. John James, The Master Masons of Chartres (1982; repr., Sydney, Australia: West Grimstead, 1990).

  45. Ibid., quoted in Strachan, Sacred Geometry, 65.

  46. Simson, Gothic Cathedral, 55.

  47. Ernst Mösel, Von Geheimnis der Form und der Urform des Seins (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1938).

  48. Hugh of St. Victor, Didasclion, quoted in Knowles, Evolution of Medieval Thought.

  49. Quoted in Southern, Making of the Middle Ages, 229.

  Chapter 14: At the Summit: Arabs, Aristotle, and Saint Thomas Aquinas

  1. See Charles H. Haskins, Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (1927; repr., New York: Meridian, 1968), 285–86.

  2. Aristotle, On the Heavens, in Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Modern Library, 1947), 436.

  3. C. Warren Hollister, Medieval Europe: A Short History (New York: Wiley, 1978).

  4. J. R. Roberts, The Pelican History of the World (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), 326.

  5. Haskins, Renaissance of the Twelfth Century.

  6. David Knowles, The Evolution of Medieval Thought (New York: Random House, 1962), 187–88.

  7. Bernard Lewis, Islam and the West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).

  8. Averroës, Commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima, quoted in Knowles, Evolution of Medieval Thought, 200.

  9. Richard Rubenstein, Aristotle’s Children (Orlando, Fla.: Harcourt, 2003), 79.

  10. Étienne Gilson, Reason and Revelation in the Middle Ages (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1939), 45.

  11. Knowles, Evolution of Medieval Thought, 200–1.

  12. Gilson, Reason and Revelation in the Middle Ages.

  13. Josef Pieper, Guide to Thomas Aquinas (New York: New American Library, 1962), 40.

  14. Jacques Maritain, Saint Thomas Aquinas (New York: Meridian, 1958), 29.

  15. Ibid., 31.

  16. Pieper, Guide to Thomas Aquinas, 84.

  17. Quoted in Donald Attwater and C. R. John, The Penguin Dictionary of Saints, rev. ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1983), 316.

  18. Knowles, Evolution of Medieval Thought, 164.

  19. Gilson, Reason and Revelation in the Middle Ages, 80.

  20. Knowles, Evolution of Medieval Thought.

  21. The military treatise was one of his most sought after during and after his lifetime. Walter Ong, Ramus: Method and the Decay of Dialogue (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963), 143.

  22. Albertus quoted in Maritain, Saint Thomas Aquinas.

  23. McKeon, Basic Works of Aristotle, 151.

  24. Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, in Introduction to Saint Thomas Aquinas, ed. Anton C. Pegis (New York: Random House, 1948), 466.

  25. Ibid., 27.

  26. Aristotle, On the Heavens; Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 466.

  27. Aquinas quoted in A. O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (1936; repr., New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 79.

  28. The translator was Robert Grosseteste. For more on Grosseteste and the later fate of Aristotle in the Middle Ages, see chapter 15 of this book.

  29. Anthony Kenny, Medieval Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), 160.

  30. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Question 1, Section 1, in Pegis, Introduction to Saint Thomas Aquinas, 4.

  Chapter 15: The Razor’s Edge

  1. David Knowles, The Evolution of Medieval Thought (New York: Random House, 1962), 244, 233.

  2. A. C. Crombie, Medieval and Early Modern Science (1953; repr., New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1959), 1:207, 218.

  3. “Biblical history is lost,” Bacon once wrote in frustration. “Numberless books of Hebrew and Greek expositors are wanting [translators]…. It is an amazing thing, this negligence of the Church.” Quoted in Jean Gimpel, The Medieval Machine: The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages (New York: Penguin, 1976), 189.

  4. W. T. Jones, A History of Western Philosophy, vol. 2, The Medieval Mind (New York: Harcourt Brace & World, 1971).

  5. Knowles, Evolution of Medieval Thought, 285.

  6. Bacon quoted in Gimpel, Medieval Machine, 192.

  7. Jones, Medieval Mind.

  8. Crombie, Medieval and Early Modern Science, 1:102–5.

  9. Gilson, Reason and Revelation in the Middle Ages (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1939), 87.

  10. Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (1945; repr., New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007), 473.

  11. Ernest A. Moody, The Logic of William of Ockham (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1935).

  12. Ibid.

  13. Gilson, Reason and Revelation in the Middle Ages, 86–87.

  14. Richard Rubinstein, Aristotle’s Children (Orlando, Fla.: Harcourt, 2003), 79.

  15. Walter Ullmann, A History of Political Thought: The Middle Ages. (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1965), 51.

  16. Papal bull Unam Sanctam, in Brian Tierney, ed., The Crisis of Church and State 1050–1300 (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1964), 188–89.

  17. William of Ockham, A Short Discourse on Tyrannical Government, ed. A. S. McGrade (Cambrdige: Cambridge University Press, 1992), xvii.

  18. A brief account of the power of the pope, quoted in Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 2:38.

  19. Dialogue, in Evart Lewis, Medieval Political Ideas (1954; repr., New York: Cooper Square, 1974), 2:399–400.

  20. William of Ockham, Short Discourse, 60.

  21. Ibid.

  22. Ibid., 124.

  23. Dialogue quoted in Skinner, Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 38.

  24. Hwa-Yong Lee, Political Representation in the Middle Ages: Marsilius in Context (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2008).

  25. Heiko Oberman, The Harvest of Late Medieval Theology (1963; repr., Durham, N.C.: Labyrinth, 1983).

  26. Almain quoted in Skinner, Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 45.

  27. See for example Gerald Christianson, Thomas M. Izbicki, and Christopher M. Belitto, The Church, the Councils, and Reform: The
Legacy of the Fifteenth Century (Washington, D.C. Catholic University Press, 2008), 17–18.

  28. Stillman Drake, Galileo (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 8.

  Chapter 16: Aristotle, Machiavelli, and the Paradoxes of Liberty

  1. Georges Duby, Eleanor Levieux, and Barbara Thompson, The Age of the Cathedrals: Art and Society 980–1420 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 232.

  2. Erasmus was educated at a Brethren of the Common Life school in Deventer. See Johan Huizinga, Erasmus and the Age of Reformation (1924; repr., New York: Harper & Row, 1957), and chapter 18 of this book.

  3. Hans Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966), 35.

  4. Ibid., 38.

  5. Aristotle, The Politics of Aristotle, trans. and ed. Ernest Barker (1946; repr., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 134 (III:13, 1283b).

  6. Ibid., 118 (III:9, 1280a).

  7. J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975), 68.

  8. Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance, 35.

  9. Ibid., 43.

  10. Ibid., 188.

  11. Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978). The link between rhetoric and liberty went back in cities like Padua as well as Florence to the 1100s. At one point, the poet Petrarch had even dreamed of restoring the Roman republic through the power of civic eloquence.

  12. Ibid.

  13. Otto von Gierke, Political Theories of the Middle Ages, trans. F. W. Maitland (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958).

  14. Pocock, Machiavellian Moment; Benjamin Kohl and Ronald G. Witt, The Earthly Republic: The Italian Humanists on Government and Society (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978).

  15. Bruni quoted in Baron, Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance, 419.

  16. Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Artists, trans. George Bull (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987).

  17. Vespasiano da Bisticci, Renaissance Princes, Popes, and Prelates: The Vespasiano Memoirs: Lives of the Illustrious Men of the Fifteenth Century, trans. William George Waters and Emily Waters (New York: Harper, 1963), 372.

  18. Paul Kristeller, Renaissance Thought (1955; repr., New York: Harper & Row, 1961).

  19. Leon Battista Alberti, Autobiography, quoted in Kenneth Clark, Civilisation (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 89.

  20. Lauro Martines, April Blood: Florence and the Plot Against the Medici (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).

  21. Pasquale Villari, The Life and Times of Girolamo Savonarola (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1888), 753–54.

  22. Girolamo Savonarola, “Treatise on the Constitution and Government of Florence,” in Renée Neu Watkins, ed., Humanism and Liberty: Writings on Freedom from Fifteenth-century Florence (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1978), 238.

  23. Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1929; repr., New York: Harper & Row, 1958), 1:305.

  24. Pasquale Villari, The Life and Times of Girolamo Savonarola (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1888), 759.

  25. Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. George Bull (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), 9.

  26. On Machiavelli’s education, see Herbert Butterfield, The Statecraft of Machiavelli (New York: Collier Books, 1962).

  27. Aristotle quoted in Baron, Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance, 432–33.

  28. Machiavelli, letter of September 1512, in The Letters of Machiavelli, ed. Felix Gilbert (New York: Capricorn Books, 1961), 91–92.

  29. Roberto Ridolfi, The Life of Niccolò Machiavelli, trans. C. Grayson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 129.

  30. Machiavelli, letter of September 1512, in Gilbert, Letters of Machiavelli, 94.

  31. Machiavelli’s account of his imprisonment is in the form of a sonnet, “Io ho, Guiliano, in gamba un paio di geti,” quoted in Ridolfi, Life of Machiavelli.

  32. Machiavelli to F. Vettori, December 10, 1513, in Gilbert, Letters of Machiavelli, 142.

  33. Butterfield, Statecraft of Machiavelli, 28, 64; Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, 22.

  34. Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, 185–87.

  35. Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses, trans. Leslie Walker (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), 123 (I:6).

  36. Ibid., 113 (I:4).

  37. Ibid., 223–25 (I:46–47).

  38. Ibid., 123 (I:6).

  39. Ibid.

  40. Ibid., 163 (I:18).

  41. Ibid.

  42. Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. Russell Price (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 50 (VI).

  43. Ibid., 89 (XIV), 99 (XVIII).

  44. Machiavelli, The Prince, 62 (XVIII).

  45. Ibid., 90–91 (XXVI).

  46. Machiavelli, Discourses, 137–38 (I.10).

  47. Machiavelli, The Prince, 99 (XVIII).

  Chapter 17: The Creative Ascent: Plato and the High Renaissance

  1. Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), vol. 1; Jason Goodwin, Lords of the Horizons: A History of the Ottoman Empire (New York: Henry Holt, 1998), 32.

  2. Gibbon, Decline and Fall, 968.

  3. Marsilio Ficino, Letters (London: Shepheard-Walwyn, 1975); Arthur Field, Origins of the Platonic Academy in Florence (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988).

  4. In a famous passage in the dialogue Theatetus (150b–d), Socrates describes himself as an intellectual midwife.

  5. Paul Kristeller, Renaissance Thought (1955; repr., New York: Harper & Row, 1961), 58.

  6. Sem Dresden, Renaissance Humanism (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968), 24.

  7. Christine Raffini, Marsilio Ficino, Pietro Bembo, Baldassare Castiglione: Philosophical, Aesthetic, and Political Approaches in Renaissance Platonism (New York: Peter Lang, 1998).

  8. Ficino, Letters; Raffini, Marsilio Ficino, 27–28.

  9. Plato, The Symposium, trans. Christopher Gill (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999), (210d).

  10. Ibid., (211c, 212b).

  11. Its doctrines are also consistent with the discussion of love in another later Platonic dialogue, the Phaedrus.

  12. Marsilio Ficino, Platonic Theology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 1:9.

  13. Paul Kristeller, ed., Eight Philosophers of the Renaissance (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1964), 47.

  14. Plato, Symposium, (212a).

  15. Ficino, Platonic Theology, 4:225.

  16. Ibid., 4:183.

  17. Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries of the Renaissance (New York: Norton, 1968).

  18. Ficino, Commentary on the Symposium, quoted in John Nelson, The Renaissance Theory of Love: The Context of Giordano Bruno’s “Eroici Furori” (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958), 77.

  19. The quotation is from Saint Augustine but was extremely well known to Ficino, Pico, and other Renaissance scholars. Wind, Pagan Mysteries, 21.

  20. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Syncretism in the West: Pico’s 900 Theses (1486), trans. S. A. Farmer (Tempe, Ariz.: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1998), 337, 245, 295.

  21. Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977).

  22. Pico, Commentary on Beniveni’s Canzona d’Amore, quoted in Wind, Pagan Mysteries, 17.

  23. D. P. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella (London: Warburg Institute, 1958); Frances A. Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972).

  24. “On the Dignity of Man,” in Paul Kristeller, ed., The Renaissance Philosophy of Man (1948; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), 224–25.

  25. Kristeller, Eight Philosophers.

  26. Christiane Joost-Guignier, Raphael’s Stanza della Segnatura: Meaning and Invention (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 73–77.

  27. The parallels between Faust and Pico
are explored in Harold Jantz, Goethe’s Faust as a Renaissance Man: Parallels and Prototypes (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1951).

  28. Joost-Guignier, Raphael’s Stanza, 91, 92–93.

  29. Kristeller, Eight Philosophers, 63. Pico specifically said that Moses anticipated many of the doctrines of the Timaeus. Joost-Gaugier, Raphael’s Stanza, 150.

  30. Joost-Guignier, Raphael’s Stanza, 90.

  31. Charles de Tolnay, The Art and Thought of Michelangelo (New York: Pantheon, 1964), 32.

  32. “The best of artists never has a concept / A single block of marble does not contain”: Michelangelo, Sonnet 149, Complete Poems and Letters of Michelangelo, ed. Creighton Gilbert (New York: Vintage, 1963), 100.

  33. Lauro Martines, Scourge and Fire: Savonarola and the Republic of Florence (London: Jonathan Cape, 2006).

  34. Michelangelo, letter of September 18, 1512, in Complete Poems and Letters, 211.

  35. Michelangelo, Sonnet 10, ibid., 8.

  36. Michelangelo, Sonnet 60, ibid., 39–40.

  37. Michelangelo, letter to G. F. Fatucci, December 1523, ibid., 237.

  38. Plato’s discussion of prophecy as “divine madness” is in the Phaedrus.

  39. Quoted in Sydney J. Freedberg, “Michelangelo: The Sistine Ceiling,” in Charles Seymour Jr., ed. Michelangelo: The Sistine Chapel Ceiling (New York: Norton, 1972), 193.

  40. Ibid., 201.

  41. Ficino, Platonic Theology, 1:9.

  Chapter 18: Twilight of the Scholastics: The Reformation and the Doom of Aristotle

  1. Michelangelo, sonnet to John of Pistoia, in Complete Poems and Letters of Michelangelo, ed. Creighton Gilbert (New York: Vintage, 1963), 6.

  2. Heinrich Boehmer, Road to Reformation: Martin Luther to the Year 1521 (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1946), 64–65.

  3. Erik H. Erikson, Young Man Luther (New York: Norton, 1962), 173.

  4. Boehmer, Road to Reformation, 64.

  5. “The chief end of the Apostle in this letter is to destroy all Righteousness and wisdom of our own [and] that Christ and his Righteousness are necessary for us, for [the] genuine extermination” of our sins. Luther quoted in E. Gordon Rupp, The Righteousness of God: Luther Studies (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1968), 160–61.

 

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