The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (Politically Incorrect Guides) (32 page)

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Authors: Anthony Esolen

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The Renaissance lavished attention on the human body, true. Donatello sculpted the first bronze nude since classical antiquity, his famous
David
, girlish and comfortable in his skin. Leonardo drew maps of human musculature, in repose and in motion, attempting to establish the mathematical harmonies among the parts of the body. He had no formal education, but Raphael, for one, recognized the latent Platonism in his works and painted Leonardo as the heavenward-gesturing Plato in his
School of Athens
. But the Renaissance is also an age of corpses:
 
What’s this flesh? a little crudded milk, fantastical puff-paste: our bodies are weaker than those paper prisons boys use to keep flies in—more contemptible, since ours is to preserve earthworms. (John Webster,
The Duchess of Malfi
4.2.124–7; 1623)
 
 
Thomas More was not the only man to keep a grinning skull at his desk as a reminder. Fashionable ladies wore rings engraved with skulls. John Donne wrote a series of meditations on a dangerous sickness he survived, and had his portrait taken wound up in a shroud. Go to the cathedral at Bern to enjoy stained glass windows of gleeful skeletons playing alongside a fat oblivious bishop or a drinker or a whoremaster. Those are Renaissance windows, post-Reformation.
 
Yet the Renaissance needs no cheat. It has plenty of genuine gold.
 
What then was this dynamic age, and what can we who gag on the oatmeal of political correctness learn from it? To answer that, I’d like to focus on three topics, each of them prime for misconception: the Glory of Man, the Resurgent Pagan, and the Collapse of Authority.
 
Is there a nature in this man?
 
“Most esteemed Fathers,” writes the young polymath Giovanni Pico della Mirandola:
 
I have read in the ancient writings of the Arabians that Abdala the Saracen on being asked what, on this stage, so to say, of the world, seemed to him most evocative of wonder, replied that there was nothing to be seen more marvelous than man. And that celebrated exclamation of Hermes Trismegistus, “What a great miracle is man, Asclepius,” confirms this opinion. (
Oration on the Dignity of Man
)
 
 
Behold the boundless confidence of the Renaissance spirit that bursts into view here. Pico has read classical Arabic and quotes not Augustine or Thomas, but Abdala the Saracen on man’s dignity. Then he quotes the mystic Thrice-Blessed Hermes, a writer in the occult mystery traditions of the third century. Pico means no disrespect to Christians. He was a good Catholic, and his
Oration
will cite, with that same wide-eyed youthfulness, Genesis, the Torah, the Psalms, the Book of Job, Saint Paul, Pseudo-Dionysius, and a passel of other Fathers of the Church. Not to mention Homer, Zoroaster, the Jewish Cabbalists, and anyone else from whom he believes wisdom is to be gleaned.
 
To do otherwise, “to enclose oneself within one Porch or Academy” (44), is to desire mediocrity when God has granted us the capacity to address all imaginable questions. It is also to miss real graces and glories ready to be appreciated. Among Christians, who have come late to philosophy, says Pico, “there is in John Scotus both vigor and distinction, in Thomas, solidity and sense of balance” (44), and so forth, as the youth samples them all like a connoisseur.
 
“So far so good,” says the slack-minded professor of today, in his class on Comparative Religions, which might otherwise be called Comparative Irrelevance. “Pico knew that it really did not make a difference what you believe.” But that is to miss Pico’s point altogether. We can range across all traditions and authorities, because ultimately all lead to contemplation of the One and immutable God. It is not relativism but brash confidence that God has granted to all peoples real vision of his truth and beauty. Pico did
not
say that it was ultimately irrelevant whether you were an Aristotelian or a Platonist. He said that if you examine the authors more closely, you will discover how their apparent contradictions may be reconciled. He did
not
say that Zoroaster was the equal of Moses because, as the politically correct would say, with a toss of the head, “We can’t know anything about God in any case.” He said that if you enter the minds of these lawgivers you will find them, in different respects, adhering to the truth.
 
We live in a world of multiplicity and mutability, and yet the wise behold the beauty of these many things and rise from them to the central and supreme Beauty that sustains them. It is why the eclectic Pico can in one breath recall Jacob’s dream of angels ascending and descending a ladder from earth to heaven—a standard medieval image of the contemplative Christian life—and the Egyptian myth of the scattered limbs of Osiris, brought back into unity by the sun god “Phoebus,” from the Greek pantheon (16–17).
 
What then is man, so endowed with intelligence? Pico answers with a parable. When God created the world, He endowed all other creatures with some property to define their natures. Still, He wanted a creature “which might comprehend the meaning of so vast an achievement, which might be moved with love at its beauty.” But alas, God had already given away every particular place in the chain of Being. So, since this special creature, man, could have nothing properly his own, God gave him the capacity to partake of the gifts belonging to all other creatures. It would be his nature to have no nature, to ascend to the angels, or, in wickedness, to descend to the beasts:
The nature of all other creatures is defined and restricted within laws which We have laid down; you, by contrast, impeded by no such restrictions, may, by your own free will, to whose custody We have assigned you, trace for yourself the lineaments of your own nature. . . . We have made you a creature neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, in order that you may, as the free and proud shaper of your own being, fashion yourself in the form you prefer.
 
 
 
 
PC Myth: Galileo Invented Modern Science
 
Galileo is the stereotypical hero of “science” against the repressive forces of religion. It turns out the Church never denied Earth could move around the sun, but insisted he didn’t have enough evidence to teach it as a settled fact. Albert Einstein agreed with the Church:
 
It has often been maintained that Galileo became the father of modern science by replacing the speculative, deductive method with the empirical, experimental method. I believe, however, that this interpretation would not stand close scrutiny.
—Albert Einstein
, foreword to Galileo’s
Dialogue
Concerning the Two Chief World Systems
 
 
 
Einstein acknowledges that Galileo had no proof that Earth revolved around the sun. He could not have had proof, because “a complete theory of mechanics was lacking,” at least until Newton. It was his longing for such a proof which “misled him into formulating a wrong theory of the tides,” a theory he never would have accepted, says Einstein, “had his temperament not got the better of him.”
 
 
That trust in the infinite possibilities of man, both for good and for evil, is everywhere to be found in this time, showing up in different forms in different places. Take the work of Pico’s young acquaintance, Michelangelo. In his titanic
Creation of Adam
, the first man, in classical repose, almost lassitude, awaits the spark of life communicated to him by the finger of God. It is not the clay that Michelangelo paints, but the space between God’s finger and man’s, a space of electric tension, to be bridged by the Almighty: “And he breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul” (Gen. 2:7). It is a painting of God making a creature in His image: power, communicating power.
 
The same trust shows up in the poet Edmund Spenser, a staunch Protestant who one would think might be suspicious of optimism coming from Italy. But Spenser has only praise for Pico, whose ladder of contemplation he transforms into a ladder of love:
 
For love is Lord of truth and loyalty,
 
Lifting himself out of the lowly dust
 
On golden plumes up to the purest sky. (
Hymne of Love
, 176–8)
 
 
The dour John Milton, in his blindness considering all the lovely things he can no longer see, brings his longing to a poignant and typically Renaissance climax:
Thus with the year
 
Seasons return, but not to me returns
 
Day, or the sweet approach of Ev’n or Morn,
 
Or sight of vernal bloom, or Summer’s Rose,
 
Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine.
 
(
Paradise Lost,
3.40–44)
 
 
 
For the face—enfolded between the words “human” and “divine”—is human because it is divine, and can reflect the divine by its intelligence and love. It is the loveliest part of the human body, which itself, in Milton, Michelangelo, Spenser, Leonardo, and almost everyone else who wrote about it or painted it, is the most beautiful object in all of physical creation:
 
Nor hath God deigned to show Himself elsewhere
 
More clearly than in human forms sublime,
 
Which, since they image Him, alone I love. (Michelangelo, Sonnet 56, 12–14)
 
 
None of these artists would have understood the secular aversion to seeing man as made in the image of God, and the universe, man’s domain in both time and space, as the ordered and unfolding creation of God. Indeed, they well understood that if you ignore the divine, what is left of nature is cruel, and what is left of sinful man is loathsome. If the world is not oriented toward the good, and if man is but a higher brute, then, as the bloody tyrant Macbeth puts it, our life:
 
. . . is a tale
 
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
 
Signifying nothing. (
Macbeth,
V.v.26–28)
 
 
But why embrace Macbeth’s madness? The artists loved the beauty of man and the world all the more, because they believed that the beauty reflected the beauty of the Maker.
 
If man’s body is beautiful, so much the more is his intellect. Not only can it appreciate the work of the Creator, it also is endowed with the Creator’s spark, and by art can work wonders beyond those of nature:
 
Neither let it be deemed too saucy a comparison to balance the highest point of man’s wit with the efficacy of nature, but rather give right honor to the heavenly Maker of that maker, who having made man to His own likeness, set him beyond and over all the works of that second nature, which in nothing he showeth so much as in poetry, when with the force of a divine breath he bringeth forth things far surpassing her doings. (Philip Sidney,
Apology for Poetry
)
 
 
Are there no bounds for the intellect? Christopher Marlowe’s Faustus turns to necromancy because he believes it is the one subject fit for an infinite longing to know:
 
But his dominion that exceeds in this,
 
Stretcheth as far as doth the mind of man. (
Doctor Faustus
, I.i.59–60)
 
 
Are there no bounds for man’s will? Not if you want power, says Machiavelli, who recommends a bold and ruthless hand to unite Italy, “because fortune is a woman, and it is necessary, in order to keep her down, to beat her and to struggle with her. And it is seen that she more often allows herself to be taken over by men who are impetuous than by those who make cold advances” (
The Prince
, ch. 25). One may stand in alienation beyond all men, as does Shakespeare’s Richard of Gloucester, who ponders how he will murder his brothers en route to grasping the crown of England:
 
I have no brother, I am like no brother;
 
And this word “love,” which graybeards call divine,
 
Be resident in men like one another
 
And not in me: I am myself alone. (
3 Henry VI
, V.vi.80–83)
 
 
By now perhaps the reader senses that something is amiss. How have we slid from “I am man, I can do anything” to “I am beyond man,
I may do anything
”? There are, I think, two causes, and Renaissance writers and artists were aware of them. We are not aware of them, we who are happily sending mankind down the cloning line, reducing children to “resources” to be warehoused, altering genes, stapling breasts to men and testicles to women, and strutting about like gods while allowing ourselves to be considered no more than products of social, technological, and bureaucratic engineering, as if we were so much processed cheese. So then, let’s pay attention.

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