Renaissance Genius #1
A non-Judeo-Christian perspective on European civilization
History is always a matter of perspective. From whose point of view are we looking at the past? When it comes to the history of Western European civilization, there are two major perspectives. If I look at it from within the Church, I will see it as fundamentally Christian. I will see the Catholic faith as the soul of our civilization. Our civilization was born with the Church, and therefore must die with it. I will consider the classical Middle Ages as the golden age of our civilization, because it’s the period of the Church’s greatest influence, when all men, except for a few heretics, seemed submissive to the authority of the Pope, who needed only snap his fingers to send the semi-barbarian military class to Jerusalem.
From that perspective, the Renaissance is the beginning of de-Christianization, and must therefore be seen as a destructive process. Such opinion is quite common among Roman Catholics, even today. Some still quote Henri Delassus’s La Conjuration antichrétienne (1910):
the whole movement impressed on Christianity by the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Revolution is a satanic effort to tear man away from the supernatural order established by God at the beginning and restored by Our Lord Jesus Christ in the midst of time, and to confine man to naturalism.
The Renaissance, to this Catholic priest, was the rebirth of “paganism”, which in this intellectual milieu is almost synonymous with satanism (quite logically, since the jealous God of both the Old Testament and the New Testament taught us to look at all other gods as demons):
Paganism, pushing mankind down the slope to which original sin had led it, told man that he was on earth to enjoy the life and goods that this world offered him. The pagan did not aspire, did not seek anything beyond.
There are grave misunderstandings here. First, paganus originally means “peasant” or country folk; it was used by the Church as an insult against its enemies. No pre-Christian Roman or Renaissance intellectual ever declared himself a pagan. And if by “paganism” we mean “polytheism”, it misses the point. Renaissance men had little time for the ancient gods. What they loved was philosophy, which, in their vocabulary, encompassed all fields of knowledge. Ancient philosophers themselves generally looked down on traditional religion: Socrates was sentenced to death under the charge of disrespect for the city gods. Finally, ancient philosophy has little to do with “naturalism” (meaning materialism), still less with atheism. It simply conveys a vision of God and His Providence (a word that Christians borrowed from the Stoics, like Logos) that is at odds with the foreign Judeo-Christian tradition that invaded Europe from the Levant.
The alternative perspective on the Renaissance that I’m going to present here agrees with the Christian perspective on two points. Firstly, the Renaissance was indeed a profound break with the medieval order; it was almost the birth of a new civilization. Secondly, this break was a renewed continuity with the Greco-Roman heritage; it was a second Greek miracle. Where my perspective differs is in the higher value I ascribe to this amazing civilizational awakening. I will point out that the greatest achievements of European civilization came from the Renaissance, and that we cannot admire European civilization without marveling at the genius of the Renaissance.
This perspective is not new. When I say, in essence, that European civilization blossomed during the Renaissance by grafting itself on Greco-Roman antiquity, I’m simply echoing the vision of the Renaissance men themselves.
Is this an important topic of discussion? Yes, it is of paramount importance to anyone who admires Western civilization and is concerned about its destiny. For, in order to form a realistic vision of its possible future, we must first get a clear understanding of its foundations. If we consider Christianity to be the soul of the West, then we must either despair or pray for an eschatological miracle. On the other hand, we can see the light at the end of the tunnel if we recognize that the genius of European civilization is the genius of Greco-Roman (or Hellenistic) civilization, awakened from its medieval slumber by the Renaissance. Anthony Gottlieb, author of The Dream of Reason: A History of Western Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance, uses an evocative metaphore: “Having pricked its finger on Christian theology, philosophy fell asleep for about a thousand years until awakened by the kiss of Descartes.”[1] (Whether Prince Charming was Descartes is debatable, though: the Platonic Academy of Florence was created almost two centuries before his Discourse on the Method.)
Dechristianization is irreversible, but it does not mean the death of our civilization, because Christianity is neither the first nor the principal root of our civilization. For good or bad, Christianity has nourished our civilization for a time, but did not create it: we are still the heirs of Athens and Rome, far more than of Jerusalem and the Vatican. We are Greco-Romans in a deeper sense than we are Judeo-Christians.
About the Middle Ages
The men of the Renaissance coined the term “Middle Ages” to describe what they perceived as a long eclipse of Greco-Roman thought and knowledge.[2] Today, the relevance of this category is debated. The period from the 4th to the 8th century is now referred to as “Late Antiquity”, characterized by the decadence of Roman institutions and culture, and the conquest of the minds by Christianity. It was not until the end of the 10th century that Romanesque art appeared, the oldest surviving vestiges of medieval civilization, so to speak. Romanesque architecture is hardly distinguishable from Roman architecture, and is simply called l’art roman in French. Indeed, European chroniclers from the beginning of the 11th century believed they were still living in Romano orbe.[3]
The classical Middle Ages start in the mid-11th century. It was the age of the cultural hegemony of the Roman Church. Or was it? Because the Church had a virtual monopoly on writing at this time, historians, who depend on written sources, tend to confuse medieval culture with clerical culture, forgetting that churchmen represented a tiny percentage of the European population. The overwhelming majority of lay people didn’t understand Latin, but they thought nonetheless, and had a rich oral culture grounded in pre-Christian lore (this was the subject of my PhD thesis, adapted into my book La Mort féerique, Gallimard, 2011).
It is a serious but common mistake to attribute the cultural achievements of the Middle Ages to Christianity. Consider the emblematic example of Gothic cathedrals. They are Catholic for sure. But who built them? Bishops were the main fundraisers, but they had nothing to do with the technical and aesthetic prowess of these masterpieces. The architects and builders of cathedrals were highly specialized craftsmen organized into independent guilds. As it happens, some of those men called themselves “free masons”, because they were free to travel throughout Europe and choose their employers. These builders liked to claim a secret knowledge dating back to Antiquity. It’s ironic that Freemasonry has become, in the eyes of authors like Henri Delassus, the Church’s archetypal enemy, even declared satanic by Pope Leo XIII in the 1890s. There is, of course, no identity between the Freemasonry that emerged in the 18th century and the medieval guilds, but the filiation is indisputable.
I don’t want to draw exaggerated conclusions from this remark, nor do I wish to dispute the architectural genius of the Middle Ages. I am simply drawing attention to the logical error of crediting “Christianity” or “the Church” with everything that we see as embodying medieval “Christendom”. The causal link that is commonly postulated between the Catholic Church and European civilization is largely imaginary.
The big question is whether it is Christianity that has made Europe great, or whether it is Europe that, for a time, has made Christianity great. To answer that question, you only have to look at what Christianity has produced among non-European peoples (and I count the Byzantines as Greek, therefore European).
It’s worth recalling that the term “Gothic” (gotico) applied to architecture first appeared during the Renaissance, with a pejorative connotation on the part of Italian artists and architects, who saw the flamboyant Gothic of the late Middle Ages as barbaric mannerism, and preferred to return to the Roman standards. They rediscovered these standards in 1414 in the ten volumes of Vitruvius’ De architectura (1st century BC), which was totally unknown in the Middle Ages. Vitruvius’ aesthetic principles, based on geometry, equilibrium, and the imitation of nature, were to influence not only architects, but also artists. We are all familiar with Leonardo da Vinci’s reproduction of the “Vitruvian Man”:
The men of art
It was a Florentine scholar, Poggio Bracciolini, who discovered Vitruvius’ work. The city of Florence, the first cradle of the Renaissance, had been an independent Republic since the 11th century, like other Italian cities—including Rome, whose citizens expelled the Pope several times. In the 15th century, under the benevolent rule of the Medici family (Cosimo the Elder and his grandson Lorenzo the Magnificent), Florence was leading an extraordinary artistic and literary revival. With the founding of a Platonic Academy in 1462, which was to become a major center of intellectual exchange, Florence saw itself as the reincarnation of Athens.
It’s the Florentine Michelangelo who first springs to mind when we think of the breathtaking technical and aesthetic excellence reached in the art of sculpture during the Renaissance. It was made possible by the study of Greek and Roman models, and by the study of anatomy, which had been almost impossible under Catholic rule. Nothing comparable to Renaissance sculpture existed in the Middle Ages. Michelangelo’s David, sculpted from a single seventeen-foot high block of marble, raises with special intensity the question of the relationship (or non-relationship) between Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian traditions. From which of these two sources did Michelangelo’s genius come from? Clearly, his David is not Jewish, but Greek. Look closely!