The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (Politically Incorrect Guides) (36 page)
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Authors: Anthony Esolen
BOOK: The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (Politically Incorrect Guides)
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It is historical nonsense to say that Francis Bacon invented the scientific method. Scientists had for centuries been observing nature and drawing practical conclusions from it, and scientists long after Bacon would allow unproved or unprovable assumptions about the world to color what they saw, or to determine whether they saw anything at all. What Bacon did, rather, was to restrict what we will call knowledge, and to dispense with many an old and reliable tool for gaining it. Is it then such a great surprise that our current social scientists, when they are not blinded by political correctness, will “discover” what everybody has always known—for example, that girls like dolls and boys like swords? Blind Homer could have told us that, almost three thousand years ago.
Meanwhile Europe, smitten with wanderlust since the Crusades, could not sit still at home. Vasco da Gama sailed around the Cape of Good Hope to try to win for Portugal a route to the spice-rich Indies, bypassing both the Mediterranean Sea, controlled by the Venetians, the Genovese, and the Muslims, and the overland caravan route through Muslim countries. One of his shipmates stayed behind in Africa and trekked inland to discover, near one of the sources of the Nile, a lost Nestorian Christian kingdom.
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Columbus believed he could outflank the Italians and the Portuguese by going west across the Atlantic; and we know what happened then. Europeans were flooded with stories from strange lands: about a Pocahontas doing naked cartwheels in front of the men of Jamestown, or about the mandarin Chinese, secretive and sly, fascinated by mechanical gadgetry like European watches and clocks.
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Columbus believed he could outflank the Italians and the Portuguese by going west across the Atlantic; and we know what happened then. Europeans were flooded with stories from strange lands: about a Pocahontas doing naked cartwheels in front of the men of Jamestown, or about the mandarin Chinese, secretive and sly, fascinated by mechanical gadgetry like European watches and clocks.
The Christian faith affirmed a common humanity, but where was that to be found, among such a welter of cultures and customs? Some writers claimed that the barbarian customs were superior to those of the “civilized” Europeans. Montaigne tried to see cannibalism in a sympathetic light.
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Authority? Let’s not forget the nation-state, a force for political unity, but often a destroyer of tradition, and suspicious of any authority not controlled by the throne. Renaissance princes too looked back to the ancients, to revive for themselves the grandeur of Rome: states unified in religion, but far from the governance of a pope. They desired unity against the enemies outside their boundaries, but cultural uniformity within the boundaries. That unity-in-variety called Christendom dies, and all the petty and semiautonomous dukedoms and principalities die with it. The Renaissance begins the movement, still going on, to flatten the mid-level institutions that serve as a buffer between the individual and the State, and to detach the State from any theology that may curb its ambitions. Old authorities lose, and new masters win.
Take Henry VIII for example. He knew he had a slender claim to the throne. If he died without an heir, England might reel back into civil war, from which it had only recently emerged. But Henry’s wife Catherine, princess of Aragon, had borne no surviving sons. He must marry again: national considerations trump theology, wedding vows, and decency. Henry appeals to the pope for an annulment. But the pope can do nothing. He is militarily weak, and Charles of Spain, Catherine’s brother, is as much a nationalist as Henry, and is the strongest ally the pope has—a dangerous ally, as Rome found in 1527 when Charles’ troops sacked the city. Besides, a previous pope had already granted Henry dispensation to marry Catherine, his former sister-in-law. To make matters worse, Luther had already called the pope’s authority into question.
No annulment. That settled it: Henry VIII, erstwhile “Defender of the Faith” for a tract written against Luther, seized the English church. He needed money (all of the Renaissance princes did, what with the inflation caused by gold and silver brought from the Americas). So he sacked the old centers of village and rural culture, the monasteries, on pretext of reforming them. He converted the goods to cash and auctioned the estates. One of the buyers was named Washington.
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The local, traditional, Christian community, village and church, with its corporate life, is caught in a pincers. On one side, the new individualism: if you can afford to do it, you can read your own books, you can travel to strange places, and you can choose among a number of authorities. On the other side, the centralized nation-state. The pattern is repeated elsewhere, and the process continues to our day.
But the resistance, the human thirst for truth, and indeed for a transcendent authority to which to submit, was still strong, and proved tremendously creative. This resistance too is characteristic of the Renaissance. If one can no longer turn to the theology of Thomas Aquinas for certitude, because only churchmen study that old friar and nobody really understands him, and if the rhythms of village and church life that lend meaning to your years are drowned out by national anthems—Spenser writing
The Faerie Queene
to celebrate England as the new Rome, Camoens writing
The Lusiads
to celebrate Portugal as the new Rome, Tasso writing
Jerusalem Delivered
to celebrate Rome as the new Rome—then you can look within your heart and listen to the promptings of God. Hence the Baroque paintings of Caravaggio and Rembrandt and Tintoretto, focusing on a dramatic moment in the life of
this
person, who could be
any
person, even the artist. So we have Rembrandt, painting the sadness and vanity of the hedonist’s life, using his wife as a model for a barmaid, and himself as a model for the Prodigal Son, or Caravaggio, painting himself as a strangely puzzled crucifier of Saint Peter.
The Faerie Queene
to celebrate England as the new Rome, Camoens writing
The Lusiads
to celebrate Portugal as the new Rome, Tasso writing
Jerusalem Delivered
to celebrate Rome as the new Rome—then you can look within your heart and listen to the promptings of God. Hence the Baroque paintings of Caravaggio and Rembrandt and Tintoretto, focusing on a dramatic moment in the life of
this
person, who could be
any
person, even the artist. So we have Rembrandt, painting the sadness and vanity of the hedonist’s life, using his wife as a model for a barmaid, and himself as a model for the Prodigal Son, or Caravaggio, painting himself as a strangely puzzled crucifier of Saint Peter.
How Disappointing: Even the Great Artists Were Christian[Leonardo] further informed the Duke that there were still wanting to him two heads, one of which, that of the Saviour, he could not hope to find on earth, and had not yet attained the power of presenting it to himself in imagination, with all that perfection of beauty and celestial grace which appeared to him to be demanded for the due representation of the Divinity incarnate.From
Giorgio Vasari
Lives of the Painters
(Vol. 1, 317)Leonardo took so long to complete
The Last Supper
not simply because he was a perfectionist—though he was. It was his faith, in him more a matter of intuition than of theological conclusion, that demanded that he strain the nerves of his intelligence and skill and vision.
If this is Renaissance “individualism,” it certainly does search for authority, and is remarkably ingenious about it. So Ignatius of Loyola, in his
Spiritual Exercises,
enjoins upon his Jesuit followers a strict discipline for the inner spiritual life, while they obey their superiors as privates obey their officers. Hence a directive like the following, far from the spirit of the modern age:
Spiritual Exercises,
enjoins upon his Jesuit followers a strict discipline for the inner spiritual life, while they obey their superiors as privates obey their officers. Hence a directive like the following, far from the spirit of the modern age:
To be with the Church of Jesus Christ but one mind and one spirit, we must carry our confidence in her, and our distrust of ourselves, so far as to pronounce that true which appeared to us false, if she decides that it is so; for we must believe without hesitation that the Spirit of our Lord Jesus Christ is the spirit of His spouse, and that the God who formerly gave the decalogue is the same God who now inspires and directs His Church. (
Rules of the Orthodox Faith
)
Because of that very obedience and discipline, the Jesuits quickly became the most learned men in Europe. Jesuit priests, often hated by their secular lords, would try to evangelize the world. No human culture was beneath their curiosity and their care.
Nor does the yearning for community die. We long for community separate from the state, to heal the alienated individual. John of the Cross writes his haunting poems about the soul’s being wooed by God (his is the famous image of “the dark night of the soul”),
19
while serving as chaplain for a convent of Carmelite nuns in Spain. That convent includes Teresa of Avila, who reforms her order by establishing clear lines of authority and by encouraging a profound life of prayer. Her
Interior Castle
, a classic of the spiritual life, was written only at the urging of her superiors, but to the great satisfaction of her fellow sisters. The Puritans, with a very different theology from the kind that animated John and Teresa, were also moved by that same human and Christian yearning. They are called separatists, but they wanted to separate to unite. They wanted to form their own community under authority they all recognized. They could not live in England; they could not live even in Calvinist Holland. So in a ship called the
Mayflower
they sailed to America, utterly uninterested in empire, rejecting the authority of Rome, London, Wittenberg, and Geneva, yet also willing to submit to authority.
19
while serving as chaplain for a convent of Carmelite nuns in Spain. That convent includes Teresa of Avila, who reforms her order by establishing clear lines of authority and by encouraging a profound life of prayer. Her
Interior Castle
, a classic of the spiritual life, was written only at the urging of her superiors, but to the great satisfaction of her fellow sisters. The Puritans, with a very different theology from the kind that animated John and Teresa, were also moved by that same human and Christian yearning. They are called separatists, but they wanted to separate to unite. They wanted to form their own community under authority they all recognized. They could not live in England; they could not live even in Calvinist Holland. So in a ship called the
Mayflower
they sailed to America, utterly uninterested in empire, rejecting the authority of Rome, London, Wittenberg, and Geneva, yet also willing to submit to authority.
The Pilgrim Fathers, they too were Renaissance men.
Chapter 7
THE ENLIGHTENMENT: LIBERTY AND TYRANNY
Enlightenment is man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man’s inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another . . . ‘Have courage to use your own reason’—that is the motto of enlightenment. (Immanuel Kant, “What is Enlightenment?”)
1
I
t’s telling that a modern conservative might nod in agreement with Kant here. I blame it on schooling that destroys both piety and independent thought at once.
t’s telling that a modern conservative might nod in agreement with Kant here. I blame it on schooling that destroys both piety and independent thought at once.
Yet to follow Kant’s prescription means social atomism, every man’s mind alien from every other, with only the State remaining to enforce order. It also means, in practice, the replacement of one teacher, call it tradition, with another teacher, whether it is one’s own vanity and caprice, or the ambitions of an intellectual elite. We sever ourselves from the accumulated but unproved wisdom of the past, only to submit to those few, with all their unacknowledged sins and blindness. As Edmund Burke would put it, we trade upon our own rather limited capital of experience and knowledge.
2
2
Guess What?The rise of the State and the decline of the church caused the violence of recent centuries.
America was a product of both the Enlightenment and a typically English reaction against it; its conservative revolution opened up an opportunity for genuine liberty.
The wisest thinkers of the Enlightenment were the most critical of it.
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