The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (Politically Incorrect Guides) (31 page)
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Authors: Anthony Esolen
BOOK: The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (Politically Incorrect Guides)
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If wine’s for the lips of a man about to dieThen let me go in a tavern—just the place!So then the angel choirs will sing for joy,“Lord, look upon this drinker here with grace!”
30
Chaucer’s Wife of Bath “had passed many a foreign stream” (General Prologue, 464), always on pilgrimage, to Spain, the Holy Land, anywhere, with an eye to picking up another young husband to toss her in bed. But an old man from Croatia, says Dante, will travel at peril of his life to Rome, to see the cloth with which Veronica wiped the face of Jesus, on which the Savior’s image was wondrously preserved. He sits quietly in the church, amazed, saying to himself,
“And did you look like this—was this your face, O Jesus Christ my Lord and very God?” (
Paradiso
31.107–8)
Running like a river through it all is that ceaseless desire to love and to be loved, to know and to be known. For the mind and the heart, even when they bow in idolatry to a beautiful maiden or a bottle of wine, were not considered utterly separate things. They could not be utterly separate. That is because the final object of our quest to know is Love Himself:
O Light that dwell within Thyself alone, who alone know Thyself, are known, and smile with Love upon the Knowing and the Known!(
Paradiso
33.124–26)
Here we touch upon intellectual and amatory heights beyond which it is impossible to go, unless that Being who is the source of being should grant it. Here, in a place pointed to by all the pinnacles of medieval art and song and thought, knowing and loving merge, and we see “the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.” (
Paradiso
33.145)
Paradiso
33.145)
Chapter Six
THE RENAISSANCE: IT’S NOT WHAT YOU THINK
The frequency of assassination, the perennial plots, the constant vicissitudes, encouraged superstition and a romantic view of Fate. Men felt themselves to be the prey of strange destinies and turned to astrologers and magicians to strengthen their hope, to check despair, and to help them meet the uncertain future with confidence. The stars were studied as intensely as diplomatic dispatches, as a guide to action; and superstitious dread threaded the daily course of men’s lives. (J. H. Plumb,
The Italian Renaissance
)
R
ead that quote to ten college graduates, telling them only that it describes a period from the previous millennium. Then ask which. Nine will choose the Middle Ages. Yet British historian John H. Plumb, who was not friendly to the Middle Ages, is describing what life was like during the height of the Renaissance, in its epicenter in Italy, at about 1500.
ead that quote to ten college graduates, telling them only that it describes a period from the previous millennium. Then ask which. Nine will choose the Middle Ages. Yet British historian John H. Plumb, who was not friendly to the Middle Ages, is describing what life was like during the height of the Renaissance, in its epicenter in Italy, at about 1500.
Guess What?The glories of the Renaissance were the fruits of the Middle Ages and Christian culture.
Renaissance secularism is both exaggerated and given too much credit for cultural advance.
The Renaissance paved the way for modern moral decay by divorcing philosophy from faith.
You surely know the standard account of the Renaissance. Common men broke free from the tyranny of the Church, and—newly liberated—became happier and wiser. Great artists, writers, and thinkers, free to focus on something besides dusty faith, created the greatest art, philosophy, and culture Europe had ever seen. The Renaissance, in short, is pitched to us as the rejection of the Middle Ages and the glorious triumph of secularism.
These formulations all serve well the purposes of today’s elites. They denigrate religion, exalt modernity, and allow secularists to claim credit for a flowering of creativity. They also have the virtue of simplicity. Nonsense is simple, too.
The odd thing about the Renaissance is that you can’t make a general statement about it without needing, for the sake of accuracy and intellectual honesty, to retract it or qualify it a moment later. It is an age of wild contrarieties. We celebrate the grandeur of man (but man had long been revered as made in the image of God); yet our philosophies also reduce man to a selfish and ignorant brute. We slip from the grasp of the Church; but we fall abjectly under the power of an absolute monarch like Louis XIV of France, with Thomas Hobbes’ political leviathan rearing its reptilian head from the deeps. No more will parsons tell us what to do; but no more will simple Christian laborers band together in the Peace of God or the Truce of God to curb their warmongering barons.
1
Chivalry, so often only a fine cloak for mischief, is dead; and war now encompasses every class, and 20,000 ordinary citizens, including women and children, die in the siege of Magdeburg in the Thirty Years’ War.
1
Chivalry, so often only a fine cloak for mischief, is dead; and war now encompasses every class, and 20,000 ordinary citizens, including women and children, die in the siege of Magdeburg in the Thirty Years’ War.
Historians know these things, but the politically correct imagination still attributes everything wicked and backward to a “medieval” age with conveniently elastic boundaries, and everything good and “modern” to the Renaissance. We know, don’t we, that the Spanish Inquisition was an arm of the oppressive medieval Church? No, it wasn’t. It was requested from Rome in 1478 by Ferdinand of Spain, and was run by the State. It was designed to ferret out false converts from Judaism and Islam, but it had more to do with the creation of a Spanish state than with religion. The Spanish monarchs, having driven the last Moorish ruler out of Granada in 1492, and hankering for unity in a land that had long been a checkerboard of feuding dukedoms, ordered that Jews and Muslims leave the country or become Christian. It was almost as cruel and unjust as those systems of inhumanity dreamed up by modern man. But in the meantime, a general reform of the Spanish Church was undertaken by Queen Isabella and her confessor, Cardinal Ximenes; and the religious and nationalist conflicts that ravaged much of Europe for a hundred years found no traction in a united and reformed Spain.
Witches were a real preoccupation of the Middle Ages, right? Not really. As I’ve said, probably more people have been shot in American shopping malls and high schools than were executed for witchcraft in all of Europe from 1000–1300. The real hunts for witches began only after the bouts of mass hysteria in the wake of the Black Plague, which struck Europe in 1348 and flared up every twenty years or so until the nineteenth century. As for demons, none of the great medieval theologians were terribly interested in them. Dante gives them a mere supporting role, often burlesque at that, in his
Inferno.
Thomas dispenses with them in a couple of articles in his
Summa Theologica.
2
But demons are everywhere in the Renaissance imagination, particularly in the north. The legend of Doctor Faustus, the professor who sells his soul to the devil for twenty-four years of magic tricks and voluptuous succubi, is contemporary with Martin Luther. Later in the sixteenth century comes that hotel handbook on “What to Do in Case of Witchcraft,” the
Malleus Maleficarum
. One of its more delightful chapters describes how a man may bed down with a witch and later discover, to his chagrin, that he’s lost his
membrum virile,
and doesn’t know where to find it (downright Victorian, one might charge).
3
Then comes a book that influenced Shakespeare’s
Macbeth
and
King Lear
: the
Demonologie
of King James VI of Scotland, later James I of England and the commissioner of the famous Bible. That’s not to mention the Salem witch trials, conducted by learned Puritans at the turn of the enlightened 1700s.
Inferno.
Thomas dispenses with them in a couple of articles in his
Summa Theologica.
2
But demons are everywhere in the Renaissance imagination, particularly in the north. The legend of Doctor Faustus, the professor who sells his soul to the devil for twenty-four years of magic tricks and voluptuous succubi, is contemporary with Martin Luther. Later in the sixteenth century comes that hotel handbook on “What to Do in Case of Witchcraft,” the
Malleus Maleficarum
. One of its more delightful chapters describes how a man may bed down with a witch and later discover, to his chagrin, that he’s lost his
membrum virile,
and doesn’t know where to find it (downright Victorian, one might charge).
3
Then comes a book that influenced Shakespeare’s
Macbeth
and
King Lear
: the
Demonologie
of King James VI of Scotland, later James I of England and the commissioner of the famous Bible. That’s not to mention the Salem witch trials, conducted by learned Puritans at the turn of the enlightened 1700s.
What’s Love Got to Do with It?Everything. The Renaissance is our heyday of love poetry, in all the European languages: the tradition begun and flourishing in the Middle Ages comes to full flower.The politically correct line on this poetry is that it “subverts” the authority of Christian moral teaching. Nonsense. It is, in the hands of the masters, a vivid and psychologically subtle and dramatically ironic portrayal of that teaching, even as it gives full play to the natural range of human emotions: love and hate, frustration and glee, jealousy and hope. It’s why Edmund Spenser places the narrative of his love for his bride-to-be in the context of the true love that instructs all other loves. For his sequence of sonnets, the
Amoretti
, builds to a climax on Easter:Most glorious Lord of life, that on this dayDidst make thy triumph over death and sin. (68.1–2)Other writers will be more subtle about it. We lack the ears to hear.
In the Renaissance, men rose above stale authority and superstitious religious dogma, looking instead to nature and experiment to discover the laws of the physical world, yes? Actually, the ledger is not clear. Most Renaissance philosophers abandoned the Aristotelianism of the schools, which had gotten lost in a thicket of metaphysical minutiae. But they did not always take up science. The dominant philosophical outlook of the Renaissance was Neoplatonic, and gained in elegance what it lost in logical rigor. Influential writers from Marsilio Ficino in the fifteenth century to Henry More in the seventeenth believed that this world was a shadow of the immutable world of heavenly beauty, and that our contemplation ought to be channeled by earthy beauty towards that beauty above. Artists, poets, dramatists, philosophers, and even scientists were influenced by Neoplatonic mysticism, which was not conducive to making scientific hypotheses. It explains why the devout Johannes Kepler—a better astronomer, I think, than either Copernicus or Galileo—spent years trying to prove that the planetary orbits could each be inscribed in one of the five regular Platonic solids.
4
,
5
Even when he published his three laws of planetary motion, Kepler could not resist arguing that the ellipse and not the circle was the
more worthy
shape for expressing the Platonic significance of a planet.
4
,
5
Even when he published his three laws of planetary motion, Kepler could not resist arguing that the ellipse and not the circle was the
more worthy
shape for expressing the Platonic significance of a planet.
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