February 11, 2004
THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF THE DARK AGES:
The Middle Ages of reason: It was the medieval world that dragged us into the future, not the reactionary Renaissance (Terry Jones, February 8, 2004, The Observer)
To mark the start of the new millennium, the New York Times ran a leader that stated: 'A thousand years ago, when the earth was reassuringly flat and the universe revolved around it, the ordinary person had no last name, let alone any claim to individualism... Then came the Renaissance explosion of scientific discovery and humanist insight and, as both cause and effect, the rise of individual self-consciousness... the beginning of our modern era.'Is that really what they believe in New York? Do they really think that having a surname gives a person more identity than a Christian name? Isn't it rather the reverse?
And do New Yorkers really, truly believe that before the wonderful Renaissance nobody had any sense of being an individual? Have they read the General Prologue to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales? Have they read any of Boccaccio or Dante? And I name these three as specifically medieval not Renaissance.
The Renaissance was a backward-looking movement that hailed the distant past - ancient Greece and ancient Rome - as the only source of enlightenment. Petrarch, a Renaissance writer, wanted to put the clock back and to return to writing in Latin. And not just the Latin that was then current. He wanted to return to classical Latin. The Latin that was then current and still being spoken in the churches and monasteries was condemned as deficient. Rather than reviving Latin, the Renaissance killed it stone dead as a spoken language.
Chaucer, Boccaccio and Dante (although writing at the same time as Petrarch) wrote in the vernacular. They also celebrated the vitality, exuberance and individuality of ordinary men and women. They were the modernists and in that way they were truly medieval. Petrarch was the backwards-looking conservative. The proud despiser of the common people. The willing servant of a tyrant such as Bernabo Visconti. Petrarch provides a prototype for the Renaissance and for much of what follows.
In order to sell their package of conservative intellectual authoritarianism, the writers of the Renaissance had to make out that the intervening centuries were a time of darkness and ignorance into which they would now shine the light of ancient knowledge.
Ah, the comforting lies of the secular rationalists... Posted by Orrin Judd at February 11, 2004 7:33 PM
The Middle Ages are often misunderstood and misrepresented and the Renaissance over-hyped. But to claim that it was the medieval world that dragged us into the future and the Renaissance was a reactionary hotbed of conservative intellectual authoritariansism is just laughable.
That the Renaissance was backward-looking is trivially true. Men of the Renaissance saw the Ancient world as more advanced than the present in important ways, and indeed it was. They wished to recover that knowledge and advancement. Jones is playing word games.
What we have here is an anti-Renaissance partisan that is just as unfair to the Renaissance as the pro-Renaissance partisans are to the Middle Ages.
Posted by: GG at February 11, 2004 11:38 PMA little score settling is long overdue
Posted by: oj at February 11, 2004 11:53 PMI have a lousy memory.
Wasn't it the Stone Age that dragged us into the future?
Or was it the Copper Age?
Or the Bronze Age?
Or the Iron Age?
Or was it the Nuclear Age that dragged us into the Stone Age?
Posted by: Barry Meislin at February 12, 2004 2:20 AMChesterton, from his life of St. Francis:
War had broken out between Assisi and Perugia. It is now fashionable to say in a satirical spirit that such wars did not so much break out as go on indefinitely between the city-states of mediaeval Italy. It will be enough to say here that if one of these mediaeval wars had really gone on without stopping for a century, it might possibly have come within a remote distance of killing as many people as we kill in a year in one of our great modern scientific wars between our great modern industrial empires. But the citizens of the mediaeval republic were certainly under the limitation of only being asked to die for the things with which they had always lived, the houses they inhabited, the shrines they venerated and the rulers and representatives they knew; and had not the larger vision calling them to die for the latest rumours about remote colonies as reported in anonymous newspapers. And if we infer from our own experience that war paralysed civilisation, we must at least admit that these warring towns turned out a number of paralytics who go by the names of Dante and Michael Angelo, Ariosto and Titian, Leonardo and Columbus, not to mention Catherine of Siena and the subject of this story. While we lament all this local patriotism as a hubbub of the Dark Ages, it must seem a rather curious fact that about three quarters of the greatest men who ever lived came out of these little towns and were often engaged in these little wars. It remains to be seen what will ultimately come out of our large towns; but there has been no sign of anything of this sort since they became large; and I have sometimes been haunted by a fancy of my youth, that these things will not come till there is a city wall round Clapham and the tocsin is rung at night to arm the citizens of Wimbledon.
Posted by: Paul Cella at February 12, 2004 7:56 AMYou'd think that the Renaissance, so devoted to Plato, would be more congenial to a neo-Platonist like Orrin. But the Renaissance was usefully destructive.
It was regressive in that it elevated Platonism, a deadend philosophy if ever there was one, but progressive in that it revived Greek skepticism sufficiently to rip off the pretense to authority of the Church.
The key event was the exposure of the fraudulency of the Donation of Constantine, which showed that it was possible to recover reliable knowledge outside -- even in opposition to -- the guidance o f spiritual authority.
Religion was a walking corpse as an intellectual exercise after that.
To get us to modernism required an additional step. Having rejected obscurantism, thinkers had to reject Platonism. This didn't happen to any important extent until 1600.
Posted by: Harry Eagar at February 12, 2004 2:15 PMOf course Hume then restored it a few decades later and it's unchallenged since.
Posted by: oj at February 12, 2004 2:22 PM