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History and Evolution:
By William E. Steinman:
Part 50, Renaissance Men 1:
March 8, 2004:
As I indicated in my last essay I want to take a brief tour of just some of this massive outpouring of human thinking and creativity which we call the Renaissance. This will necessarily be an overview for there are a great number of contributors. The time period spans about 400 years. What I will try to present is just a brief view of what the renaissance men created in those years. The followup and detail are up to you. Though history shows the renaissance as beginning about 1350 I will begin a bit earlier than that. I want to look at some of the preceding evolution.
We can begin with the pre-renaissance Italian poet Dante Alighieri (1265-1321). Though we may not know exactly what it means, most of us have heard the phrase "Dante's Inferno." It is a reference to Dante's description of hell in his outstanding and final poem the Divine Comedy. The work was completed just before his death in 1321. It is a 14000 line poem in pentameter form about an imaginary trip through hell, purgatory, and Heaven where Dante finally gets to see God. It is really the story of his personal struggle with the fact of his exile. He was banished from his beloved Florence for his political activity in 1302.
It is not my intention to visit the details of the lives of these many remarkable men. For a student, there is a great deal to learn about Dante and the others. What I want to point up here is Dante's enormous knowledge of classic and contemporary literature that is demonstrated in this and other of his works. Though not technically a renaissance man, in a very real way, Dante was the harbinger of what was to come. Enormous and diverse knowledge, we will find, is the mark of a renaissance man. Let us borrow just one quote from this master poet. "O conscience, upright and stainless, how bitter a sting to thee is a little fault!"
Now, let us revisit the philosophy of scholasticism, We looked briefly at the scholastic school of philosophy in Part 48 which was something of a summary of the dark ages. Now this philosophy did not just dry up and die with the passing of Thomas Aquinas. It continued to grow, mutate, and influence men's thinking. It is important to understand this. The renaissance was not one great movement in a single direction toward some kind of ultimate wisdom. We had a plethora of schools of thought and creative activity, particularly in philosophy.
We must also never forget that all of this creative work was influenced by the dominant theology of the time. That was still the Christianity of Rome. All of these renaissance men were Christians. They did believe in God and in Christ. They believed in the Christian theology as they understood it. They had differing takes on their religion but there were no atheists among them. That denial of God notion did not take hold until the 19th century. Though many of these men were at odds with the church, they were never at odds with God. They may have disagreed with Aquinas' version of scholasticism and they surely disagreed with the church on points of science, but they remained men of faith. So, rather than dump scholasticism, they adapted it.
One person who created his own version of scholasticism was John Duns Scotus (1266- 1308). Scotus, a Scottish Franciscan, disagreed with Aquinas and Anselm on some finer points of theology. So, he did what all philosophers eventually do. He founded a new school of scholastic philosophy that became know, of course, as Scotism. He borrowed from Aristotle to argue against Anselm's proof of the existence of God. If I understand this correctly, he contended that God cannot be proved, he can only be demonstrated through sense experienced. I suppose, I may consider that idea the next time I have a vision or a hallucination. Rather than attribute it to tainted food, I may decide I have had a divine experience.
Scotus did not get into trouble until he took the wrong side in the argument about the Immaculate Conception. In some way, he argued against Aquinas' position which was accepted dogma at the time. I have never looked deeply into this, considering it to be irrelevant to human spirituality. It was about the church and dogma, nothing more. It all had to do with whether Mary was free of original sin or not. The church had a great deal invested in their position and Scotus argued against it. It seems that indiscretion put his life in danger. There were some serious inquisitions afoot at the time.
This all ended with Scotus leaving Paris abruptly. He went to Cologne and spent his remaining days lecturing at the university. To be sure, there is a great deal of smoke and theological nit picking in all of this debate, of the kind that philosophers and theologians dearly love. What I want to notice here is that, thanks to brilliant thinkers like Scotus, scholasticism lived on and continued to influence the renaissance and the church which eventually adopted the Scotus view.
In art, let us look at a man who is called the father of European Painting, Giotto di Bondone, 1267-1337. Before Giotto, Byzantine painting was the dominant style for some 500 years. This art form was almost entirely religious in its expression. Its general purpose was to translate church theology into artistic forms. This made it a fairly rigid art form whether in architecture or painting. There was very little personal expression involved. The result was a highly perfected and sophisticated style of spiritual expression. The emphasis was on decorativeness and flat line harmony.
Giotto broke away from that classic style and developed his own more natural style of painting which emphasized human expression and movement. In his work nature came forward and the subjects became more life like and expressive. Though he did not use a specific perspective system, he did take a natural control of space. Much of his work has been lost, but he is still credited with some of the great masterpieces of his time including his campanile (bell tower) at the cathedral in Florence . His students picked up his work and carried it throughout Europe.
Back to nit picking. Scotus was not the only philosopher of this time, nor the only critic of orthodoxy. There were a bunch of these guys poking away at each other with differing theories. In one way or another, all of them had influence of the emerging renaissance.
Durand De Saint-pourçain (1270-1334) was one of these. A French bishop, theologian, and philosopher, he was also critical of Aquinas. At this time Aquinas was the official accepted philosopher for the Dominican order. That made him a top dog. Just as in the mythical American West, we make our reputation by going against the top gun, not by shooting at rabbits. Durand believed a philosopher should follow his own reasoning rather than bow to some authority. He took the safe way and excepted articles of faith from his argument. These did not depend on reason, so he argued. This skillful ability to compartmentalize the mind into a box for faith and a separate one for reasoning has ever been the hallmark of theologians. Durand first expressed the principle of simplicity in choosing theories that was later formalized as Ockham's razor.
Aureolus, Petrus (1280-1322) was another of these French churchman
who was also a thinking philosopher. He was a critic of Scotus
and Aquinas. All of this argument was about how man comes by knowledge.
According to Petrus, man knows by direct experience of objects.
He held that the forms, essences, and universals of Scotus and
Aquinas, arrived at by reason, were fictions. We will encounter
more of the philosophical hair splitting as we go along.
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