The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance

That the period of the Renaissance - the turning point between the medieval and the modern - is of great significance in the history of Europe is beyond dispute. But its exact character and the true nature of its significance are the subject of endless discussion. Just how far perspectives have changed over one hundred and fifty years can be seen by the degree to which John Hale's considerable new work differs in its approach from Jacob Burckhardt's classic The Civilization of the Renaissance. For, unlike Burckhardt, Hale is no longer concerned simply with Italy. The northern Renaissance along the Rhine and the Loire, the Atlantic trade routes spreading out in the sixteenth century, the part played by the Fuggers and the Hanseatic towns, alongside their Italian banking colleagues, in the establishment of new patterns of European commerce - all these steps toward a recognizably modern world are included in the new book.

The purely Italian conditions that Burckhardt analyzed so penetratingly still form the starting point of Professor Hale's magisterial account of the changes that the Renaissance brought about and which, in their cultural form, could be symbolized by an English nobleman writing sonnets in Italian or a French king trying to lure Leonardo da Vinci into his service. There is something special about the phrase "Italian Renaissance" - a thrill that can suggest wild beauty or profound wickedness. Its fascination is lasting, since it includes creative achievements of permanent power.

The number of books written on the Italian Renaissance provides testimony as to the attraction it has exercised over civilized Europeans down the years. Yet have we in the past - do we now - altogether approve of the Renaissance? The Elizabethans saw the peninsula as a land given to adultery and assassination, not ill represented in Webster's "Duchess of Malfi" - inglese italianato, diavolo incarnato. The Victorian lady, who purchased her reproductions of Donatello or Della Robbia to grace the vicarage on her return to England, would hardly have regarded the doings of many Renaissance men or women as particularly genteel. More recently a BBC television film introduced a Renaissance pope as he was calling on his entourage to "bring on the whores."

Recently, too, the extreme individualism that informs the Renaissance has become unfashionable in a brave new world where we are told that we should be glad to be Beta children accepting an effortlessly democratic mediocrity. Figures like Colleone's statue in Venice appear so dominating as to be threatening to egalitarian aspirations. It was the energy of Renaissance man that gave him the confidence to undertake great deeds and carry them through. "Oh age! Oh letters! It is a joy to be alive," exclaimed Ulrich von Hutten at the beginning of the century, adding, "Woe to you Barbarians!" to display his pride in the culture he had acquired and his scorn for those who had not done likewise. The modern self-deprecatory language of the professionally modest was unnecessary for those who had no doubts about their own values. Renaissance men felt no reason to refer their actions to the judgment of others. Consultation, committees, consensus played little part in their lives. The idea that it might be sensible to collect the maximum number of opinions before taking a decision would hardly have occurred to them.

Much of what is positive in Europe's intellectual life originated at the time of the rediscovery of antiquity. It is true that, as Whitehead pointed out, the great period of scientific discovery was the seventeenth century, not the Renaissance, and that scholastic philosophy was more conducive to a philosophy of science than neoplatonism. Nonetheless, it was the Renaissance that saw individuals interesting themselves for the first time in natural phenomena. There grew up then an attentiveness to nature which meant that, sooner or later, its secrets would be discovered and linked with one another. A start was made on many things that a less self-confident age would hardly have dared to undertake.

Reading first Burckhardt and then Hale, the scope of what we describe as the Renaissance is astounding. It includes the recuperation of antiquity, the development of discovery and commerce, the pursuit of beauty, the setting of standards in literature and the arts, consciousness of the state and its activities (governance, diplomacy, war) and the analysis applied to these by a Machiavelli or a Guicciardini, the adoption of rational arguments in political matters and the decreasing use of religious imperatives of the kind produced in the Middle Ages to justify action. The modern mode of politics began at the Renaissance, as can be seen by anyone who reads an historical analysis by one of the great Renaissance historians. Indeed, in discussing the impact on our culture of the period, it is most relevant to speak of its creation of the historical consciousness. For this is its greatest gift to Western civilization, which is why accounts of the Renaissance have traditionally begun with its rediscovery of Greece and Rome.

This was almost thrust upon the princes, clerics, poets and scholars of the day. The fall of Constantinople sent Greek teachers and manuscripts to the West. The revival of Greek made Italians aware of a classical Latin heritage and opened to the humanists a new world whose values intruded into their medieval surroundings with an effect that is often bizarre. For instance, Filippo Strozzi follows the classical example of Cato of Utica by killing himself after a failed plot against the Medici. But he also makes the far from classical gesture of asking that a black pudding be made from his own blood and sent to his enemy Cardinal Cibo. Catiline and Brutus appear constantly as the models of tyrannicide. Not only scholars, but also men of action find in an heroic classical past examples that show them the way. Out of the soil of Italy itself emerges the monumental past of Rome.

The discovery of that past necessarily brought with it the discovery of history, the consciousness of the existence of an era that was other than the present. In that fact was implicit the possibility of change - of times separated from ourselves in past and future. It is not so much the books of the so-called "scientific" Italian historians from Machiavelli to Fra Paolo Sarpi that illustrate the connection of the Renaissance world with history - though they do, of course, do that - as it is the spreading awareness of the existence of another world in that past that contrasts with and informs contemporary society. History presented itself to the Italians of the Renaissance as antiquity and, hence, as an ideal. From the study of Greece and Rome emerged the high idea of contemporary history expressed by Benedetto Varchi.

But if the realization of ancient times as something distinct from the present brought with it an increased respect for the craft of historian, the existence of history implied a heightened consciousness of self. The moment an attempt was made to define another age, to endeavor the definition of one's own became a possible ambition. And such an attempt was accompanied by the establishment of standards that followed the inevitable comparisons between past and present - and, finally, by the postulating of absolutes in excellence which could be passed down from age to age, and, indeed, imitated by other civilizations.

Thus, the recovery of antiquity and the attention paid to the classical past brought with it, not only the new concept of history and biography, but also a new aesthetic, based on a heightened individualism and the growing feeling that no level of excellence was out of reach. Such self-confidence is the dynamic that has informed modern civilization - more particularly, its literature and art. This conviction, however, containing as it did the danger of delusions of genius, opened the way to the excesses of modern romanticism, where abundant merit is claimed for works that spring merely from the author's own belief in their validity. While it remains true that only a trust in his own talent can inspire the effort needed by the artist or writer to give of his best, this trust must be accompanied by standards stemming from an historical appreciation of art and literature, and be capable of being understood by those who attempt creation of this kind. Artistic creation cannot be a mere lifting of oneself up by one's own hair. It must be aided by a knowledge of the past and an ambition to imitate it. For all the originality of the Renaissance, its production of creative work went under the name of mimesis.

As Sir Joshua Reynolds put it:

He who resolves never to ransack any mind but his own, will soon be reduced, from mere barrenness, to the poorest of all imitations; he will be obliged to imitate himself, and to repeat what he has before often repeated.

But this is precisely the position of a modern writer who seeks for originality at all costs, and who asserts that he cannot be criticized since he himself knows what he means. In the, same way a critic who claims to know what Shakespeare or Milton meant, whatever the text may imply - indeed, that text can be made to mean anything - is not simply trudging around the grooves worn in his own brain, but is undermining a literary tradition dating from the Renaissance.

The rather odd critical exercise known as "deconstruction" - it could well be called "demolition" - is one such attack on civilization. In order to view the culture of the past through the prism of ephemeral political or ethnic prejudices, it destroys the respect for history that the Renaissance left us. In order to claim originality for the crass misunderstanding of a text, it gets rid of the humanist belief that a text can be understood at all. Instead of the painstaking process of interpretation that began with Renaissance scholarship it imports into the study of literature the language and reasoning of daily newspapers. Characters and events must be judged in the light of late twentieth-century values, a process that condemns us to distorting both.

"Deconstruction" and the arbitrary and politicized view of the past that comes with it are, indeed, an "anti-Renaissance," an attack on European civilization with the aim of destroying what it gained from humanism and the recovery of antiquity. The ostensible motive of such an assault is that the past and tradition are no longer "relevant," but this is to make the barbarian assumption that the citizen can neither learn nor enjoy learning. Renouncing history in the name of pedantic egotism, the contemporary critic is in danger of losing the individualism in whose name he laid claim to his right to distort meaning. For to cut loose from the past is to become detached from the definition of self which a knowledge of that past developed. What is at stake is not only the autonomy of culture - the right of the work to be understood on its own terms - but the capacity of human beings to exist independently, to know themselves and live according to that knowledge.

The importance of the invention of history by the Renaissance is now clear. That history contains the DNA code of civilization. For this portion of history gives us a clue, albeit an enigmatic one, as to how European civilization arose and also as to how it might fall. The famous objects of the Renaissance - the Virgin of the Rocks or the Laurentian Library - are not merely beautiful but also significant in the creation of a tradition to be followed.

Other periods too, of course, have been of enormous significance to Western Europe. The Middle Ages lasted over five hundred years and imposed on the length and breadth of what came to be called Christendom a stamp of religion whose external forms have endured until the present day, though its content was also changed by the Renaissance. But the Middle Ages were not conscious of themselves as an historical period. Their chronology was eschatological rather than historical. The joke in the parody of an historical play - "Nous autres, hommes du Moyen Age, qui partons pour la Guerre de Cent Ans" - depends precisely on there being no such realization, (while the famous stage direction in Max Beerbohn's Savanarola Brown - "Enter Boccaccio, Benvenuto Cellini, and many others, making remarks highly characteristic of themselves..." - satirizes a bombastic accumulation of fame which is indeed a feature of the Renaissance).

Thus if Western civilization is to survive in a recognizable form, it is Renaissance values that we must defend. The means of ensuring that these values are passed on we call education, which is only effective and civilizing when it conveys a pedagogic tradition and rejects the parochialism of the present. But much of what is called education now is an attack on any tradition at all, in the name of some short-lived and superficial rag-bag of beliefs, and on the ground that tradition is by its nature stultifying. "Didactic," we are told, has become a bad word among schoolteachers regardless of the fact that with it disappears their own particular mission and status in society. Certainly, in Britain the descent of schoolteachers in social esteem has accompanied their abdication of the right to teach.

For all their defects - their self-importance, their brutality, their spitefulness in controversy, their vanity, their frequent superficiality - the humanists of the Renaissance laid the foundations of a modern culture which has astonishing achievements to its credits. They were not yet scientific, but they were curious, and their Writings afforded access to the classical past, which, in turn, brought to them the consciousness of history. What comparable gift is available from the poor ushers who are concerned to teach children (sentimentalized as "kids") their own teenage culture, a parody of themselves? Deprived of the knowledge of a cultural tradition, they are also deprived of self-knowledge.

In the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci there is a passage, visibly inspired by Plato, where the writer speaks of sitting in front of a dark cavern and, all at once, experiencing two conflicting sensations: "fear because of the dark threatening cavern and desire to see if there were any miraculous thing within it." It is the source of the dynamism of Renaissance man which Leonardo describes so attractively here - an intellectual energy that cannot be lost without putting an end to the vigor of European civilization. Beauty and curiosity combine to build a tradition that has endured. Those who would have us mm our eyes away from the cavern take an appalling responsibility since they are demanding the destruction of the incentive to know. They are the worm at the heart of the fruit. Professor Hale's book is especially welcome at a time when we urgently need a renaissance of our own, a rebirth of knowledge and a reforging of our links with our past.

Anthony Hartley is a contributing editor to The National Interest.

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