Key ideas: Published in 2000. "The impetus born of the Renaissance was exhausted, and the new start made in the years just before 1914 had been cut short. Ridicule, denial, anti-art, and sensory simplicity mean that culture and society are in the decadent phase." (Jacques Barzun)
He was himself a monk, made into one against his will by his guardian; though not abandoned by his father he was illegitimate, and had been trapped into his vows...
His mastery of Greek, then a new accomplishment, made him a favorite of princes eager for learning, and he became the oracle of the enlightened on all subjects of timely interest. Popes consulted him and offered him bishoprics and (twice) a cardinal's hat. Universities wanted him on their faculty, Henry VIII tried to keep him at his court, Charles V took his advice, Luther begged for his support—and turned vindictive when it was refused...
Erasmus was among other things a humorist, which to the earnest means one who trifles with serious things. But Erasmus was serious enough when he refuted Luther's doctrine that most of mankind was damned from all eternity, only a few being saved, and these not for leading a good life but, unaccountably, by God's grace...
Erasmus summed up his criticism of life in one great work, The Praise of Folly. Folly, speaking for herself: "how how people of every rank and occupation prefer her to common sense." The Folly concludes that, all in all, the greater the madness, the greater the happiness.
Unfortunately, the second half of the book, though still effective in its way, abandons "story" and drops into a direct attack against clerical and other abuses. The vivid reality is still there, but art has succumbed to political passion. This verbal assault against the hierarchy came a good while before Luther felt doubts about his church or even about his soul. The Praise of Folly came out 8 years before the 95 Theses
Luther "only wanted to elicit the truth about the sacrament of penance." At the time the idea of "indulgence" was popular. The idea was: if you buy an Indulgence for your sins now, your time in Purgatory will be reduced.
Luther asked a very good question: Could the true remorse and active penance be bought on open market? This question resonated with many people.
Luther's second simple idea was: everyman is a priest. A person doesn't need a Roman Church as a middleman, a person has a direct connection to God.
Printing book had 2 important results:
1. The book brought a greater exactness to the scholarly exchange of idea - all copies are aline; a page reference can kill an argument by confounding one's opponent out of his own words.
2. A price paid for this convenience: the book has weakened the memory, individual and collective, and divided the House of Intellect into many small flats, the multiplying specialties.
Michelangelo scorned the new trick "fit only for women and children," because the amateur or the inept professional could so easily correct a mistake - scrape it off and try again. Before the colors were mixed with egg-yolk on water to a panel of panel of poplar or other wood so, one must have had an infallible hand and a far-seeing mind, and each stroke was final, as in watercolor today.
But, oil painting had one big benefit: portability. It domesticated art. By 17th century, anyone could buy a canvas and oil pain to create art.
Leonardo da Vinci was not a Renaissance man becuase he lacked the good letters. He speaks of this limitation himself. He cared nothing about Latin and Greek. He never wrote poems or oration. He had little to say about philosophy and theology. He took no interest in history... Nor was he an architect or a sculptor.
Worst of all, he had no use for music, which (he said) had two great faults-one mortal, in that music ceased to exist as soon as the piece was over, and one he called "wasting": its continual repetition, which made it "contemptible"
Another detail that did not surprise the Madrid observer of Charles's mission was that the battles-none conclusive-were mostly fought in Italy though the object of the campaigns was the control of Burgundy, the duchy that Charles's ancestors had nearly made into the Middle Kingdom of Europe. His enemy was Francis I of France...
The feudal notion of war as contest between two knights aided by their friends and servitors was with the feeling that if well fought, the battle and its outcome left honor intact. The loser goes home to bind up his wounds and start agains. Although both warriors have been fighting for property, they think rather that it was the (legal) right, neither imagines that he represents a nation, which is another reason why defeat is not disgrace...
For another 300 years, soldiers and statesmen could without blame serve a king and country other than their own. [well into 19th century] When whole provinces kept changing hands every few years, there was no fully defined nation, no "citizenship", only "subjects" who were traded about according to the chances of war.
It was yet another medieval longing, inherited from Rome and Charlemagne. The new idea of the nation-state glimmered in royal minds, though still confused with the hope of empire, which seemed more practical—the pieces were there in plain sight, and the old rights of towns and provinces were compatible with it, not with nation.
One clear hint of national reasoning was given in Charles's time when at mid-century a treaty gave France the bishoprics of Metz, Toul, and Verdun, "because French is the language spoken there." Such an argument would break up any empire.
Taxation was unavoidably haphazard, the amount having to be haggled over time and again, separately, with each town and district. After half a dozen years of deficit, unlike 20C presidents, Charles had a nervous collapse. Thirty-five of toiling and immense self-control brought him down. He felt death coming: he abdicated.
He recovered after he left Spain, which he left to his son Phillip and central Europe, with the imperial title, to his brother Ferdinand, form whom it descended to and Austrian Habsbrurgs exclusively.
But inquisition with a small i was active throughout Europe. In Protestant Scotland and Geneva, it was called the Discipline and it too relied on the secular arm to punish offenders such as Servetus.
England had its burnings, in good number, of Protestants and Catholics by turns during three reigns, all legalized by one stature: "One the Duty of Burn and Heretic".
In France it was the University of of Paris, the Sorbonne, that persecuted the Humanist printer Etienne Dolet was one victim of it's inquisition...
Inquisition as such, that is, apart from methods and severity of results, has remained a live institution.
The many dictatorship of the 20C have relied on it and in free countries in thrives ad hoc-hunting down German sympathizers, during the First World War, interning Japanese-Americans during the second, and the pursuing Communist fellow-travelers during the Cold War.
In the United States at the present time the workings of "political correctness" in universities and the speech police that punishes persons and corporations for words on certain topics quaintly called "sensitive" are manifestations of the permanent spirit of inquisitions.
Utopia in Greek means "no place". The term has since meant, in all languages, a work describing an ideal state. (p 117). The adjective "utopians" means "unworkable" but that didn't stop writers from designing happy societies.
Humanists kept an eye on Plato's Republic, which contains several of the proposed institutions-communism, eugenics with wives in common, and an end of overty and class envy, though not to permanent class duties and distinctions...
Why not call them Eutopian, the Greek prefix altered to mean the good place."Eutopias for Euphoria" might be the motto of all these writers, including some novelists...
It is a paradox that in most Eutopias (Rabelais' is an exception) the common good is achieved by enforcing a uniformity of behavior that seems tighter than any that is felt in the bad societies. The better state aims at relieving the body of hunger and the mind of anxiety; it does not promise freedom for society in the abstract, but only from the concrete privileges of the upper orders. All the batdes for social justice have been fought against the tyranny of poverty and class.
How do the Eutopias deal with their possible recurrence?
They rely on the force of good habits. But they also recognize that the magistrates must occasionally step in to prevent abuses, and at times one senses the presence of a dictator at the top to run all things right, an anticipation of the 18C Enlightened Despot.
In letting wish and fancy roam, this galaxy of writers have imagined institutions that are workable. The modern program of welfare and "social security" is a Eutopia in litde.
The guidelines for its application by the bureaucracy remind one of the details Eutopian authors like to multiply for lifelike effect, and the 20C efforts to ensure universal contentment by means not only of laws governing health, livelihood, education, and equity but also of incessant unofficial advice carries out the central idea of Eutopia.
It is the opposite of charity to the sick and the poor, seen as being always with us, and its upward-pulling power has been constant through the centuries...
Eutopian morals show how mistaken are modern critics who keep complaining that science has made great progress in improving material life but has lagged in doing the same for the ethical.
There was no progress to make. Men have known the principles of justice, decency, tolerance, magnanimity from an early date. Acting on them is another matter-nor does it seem easier for us to act on our best scientific conclusions when we deal with bodily matters: an age that has made war on smoking and given up the use of the common towel and common cup should prohibit shaking hands.
When people accept futility and absurd as normal the culture is decadent. (J. Barzun)
He made public dissections of human bodies when it was still a dangerous innovation; he became a specialist in the new disease, syphilis, and in hysteria; he taught at Lyon, then the cultural center of France, as professor of medicine and astrology, and published both almanacs and scientific papers. He also invented devices for the treatment of hernia and fractured bones.
In addition, he mastered Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and read widely in history, geography, and general literature. Competent in jurisprudence, he was an attendant of the powerful family of du Bellay in political and other capacities. He was, in short, one of the most learned men of his time and he happened besides to be a literary genius....
He evidently thought that putting his ideas in a treatise would be neither safe nor likely to reach a large audience. Instead, he worked up a narrative about giants and explorations, interspersed with vulgar anecdotes...
Pantagruelism is rooted in a noble quality of mind: to take nothing in bad part. Rabelais ascribes this power symbolically to a plant, pantagruelion, which, as its made-up Greek name suggests, is the giver of all good things—knowledge, self-improvement, space travel, and above all: contentment.
[The book to read is A Journey Into Rabelais' France by Albert Jay Nock; but note that the author's naming one of Rabelais' characters John of the Funnels is a mistake. The name des Entommeurs is not des Entonnoirs- substitute John the Hacker.]
But a greater and subtier pleasure rewards the reader who begins at the beginning and follows the self-portraiture to the end. For what the full course shows is the evolution of a mind from a negative to a positive philosophy.
As a good Humanist, Montaigne starts out believing that "to philosophize is to learn how to die." The stoics—Seneca, Epictetus—had said so and the Renaissance thinkers who were not devout found in these ancients a sober moral philosophy that was consistent with Christianity, without requiring that one "die to the world" before life was over. Instead, one lived in obedience to nature and its God, resigned to any ills that Fortune might bring, but free of the Evangelical anxiety for grace.
So things stood with Montaigne when he began his exploration. Gradually, without any upheaval of feeling such as accompanies sudden conversion, he came to see that to philosophize is to learn how to live...
To learn to die is a mental project born of worldly observation; to learn to live is also a project, but it takes in that "depth and variety," that "weakness" to which Montaigne attributes the temper of his opinions, and indeed of his experience as a whole...
This disparity between logic and action enables Montaigne to understand history, of which he is so eager a student. Character (in his sense) and history are two facets of one reality: becoming. As he declares: "I do not portray being but passing."...
Knowledge
In truth, knowledge is a great and very useful quality; those who despise it give evidence enough of their stupidity. Yet I do not set its value at that extreme measure that some attribute to it, such as the philosopher Herillus, who find in it the sovereign good and think it has the power to make us wise and happy. —Montaigne, from the "Apology for Raymond Sebond" (1569)It raises the great question whether knowledge leads to virtue and thereby to happiness. Our century possesses an amount of knowledge immeasurably greater than that Montaigne or Rabelais could gain access to. Are we proportionately wiser and happier?
There is today a body of opinion that ascribes our unhappiness precisely to the knowledge we have. What has been called here the double mind can logically desire more knowledge, like any touter of Progress, and at the same time recognize that getting it will not necessarily improve the quality of life. The knowledge of atomic fission and genetic interference is double-edged. Montaigne had a shrewd foreboding about gunpowder.
Bruno was at last accused of heresy by the Inquisition. He recanted, was imprisoned for eight years, and then re-examined. This time he did not recant and was burned alive in the year 1600.
The ancients, he pointed out, can no longer be invoked as authority, because we know more than they did. We are the ancient and wise, they were the young and ignorant. Besides, authority is worthless. The notion that something is true because a wise man said it is a bad principle. Is the thing true in fact, tested by observation?
The new tool consists in applying this test. Observe closely, record findings exacdy, and frame generalities that cover the facts, without coloring from myth, poetry, or other preconceived idea. "Go to the earth and it shall teach thee... The lessons will enable you to predict without fail the future behavior of things and thereby guide action with assurance and wisdom. Knowledge is power"...
In recent times, Bacon has been ungratefully debunked. Historians of science have pointed out with scorn that Bacon did nothing for science since he never devised or carried out experiments; and they cry up Gilbert, who worked diligendy on magnets. Bacon is said to have frozen a chicken to see if it would keep fresh, but that would not earn a Nobel Prize.
Bacon has also been accused of not understanding how scientists work, because he recommends observation free of preconceived ideas. He said "Do not anticipate Nature," and his critics point out that all great advances are made by framing a possible view of what happens and then testing it; so Bacon was wrong.
It was called great on account of its size rather than for any notable merit. When its sequel broke out in 1940, the earlier conflict was renamed First World War in deference to the second. This was an error, since the European wars of the 18C were also world wars, promiscuously fought in India and North America and on the five seas. But these, not being wars of peoples, did not threaten civilization or close an era.
The 15 years that preceded the catastrophe have since been called la belle époque and also the "the banquet years.". This nostalgic remembrance dwelt on the high artistic achievements of the Cubist Decade and on the outstanding minds that promoted social reform and forced a poliical turnaround that has shaped the present conception of the state throughout the West.
A third form of energy was also in works: the practice and cult of violence. any contemporaries blinded themselves to its significance in the enthusiasm for the abundance of original art and intellect; but many others, with fear or zeal, thought of nothing else.
Before dealing with the kinds and causes of bloodshed, the constructive effort in politics must be sketched so as to show to what degrees it bears on present-day forms of government. In England during the decade before the war, the quartet who stirred the reading public into thinking were Wells, Chesterton, Belloc, and Shaw.
By Great Switch I mean the reversal of Liberalism into its opposite.
It began quietiy in the 1880s in Germany after Bismarck "stole the Socialists' thunder"—as observers put it—by enacting old-age pensions and other social legislation.
By the turn of the century Liberal opinion generally had come to see the necessity on all counts, economic, social, and political, to pass laws in aid of the many—old or sick or unemployed—who could no longer provide for themselves. Ten years into the century, the Lloyd George budget started England on the road to the Welfare State.
Liberalism triumphed on the principle that the best government is that which governs least; now for all the western nations political wisdom has recast this ideal of liberty into liberality.
The shift has thrown the vocabulary into disorder.
In the United States, where Liberals are people who favor regulation, entidements, and every kind of protection, the Republican party, who call themselves Conservatives, campaign for less government like the old Liberals reared on Adam Smith; they oppose as many social programs as they dare.
In France, traditionally a much-governed country, liberal retains its economic meaning of free markets, and is only part of the name of one small semi-conservative party; Left and Right suffice to separate the main tendencies.
In England also, the new Liberal party numbers very few. Conservative and Labor designate the parties that elsewhere are known as Conservatives in opposition to Social Democrats.
The political reality, the actual character of the state, does not correspond to any of these labels.
For the thoughtful who take part—at a distance, it may be, and by solitary reflection—in the fiercest batde of the day, the deep division over the idea of the state, and the place of religion, there is a document that should be read to concentrate thought and guide choices. It is a section some 20 pages long in Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov. The piece is somewhat formally presented by one of the brothers, Ivan, as a poem that he wants to recite to the youngest, Alyosha; it bears a tide: "The Grand Inquisitor."
Ivan immediately adds that it is not verse and not written down; he will speak it if Alyosha will listen. What it is may be called a fantasy fiction, an allegory. Ivan is a rationalist and atheist disaffected from both heaven and earth; he might pass for an Existentialist disgusted with life. Alyosha is all candor, goodness, and simple faith—and eager to hear his brother's "poem."
The scene is Seville at the height of the Spanish Inquisition, on the day after an auto-da-fe in which 100 heretics were burned. Christ appears. He is immediately recognized by everybody. The people fall to their knees and worship. They beg that a young girl being brought out of church in her coffin be revived. He speaks and she sits up, smiling. At His word an old man regains his sight; Christ is no phantom or delusion. In the midst of the wonders, the old, very old Cardinal-Inquisitor appears. He too recognizes the stranger and orders his guards to arrest Him and put him in prison. The crowd, automatically overawed, offer no protest but fall on their knees and worship the Cardinal.
That night the Inquisitor goes to Christ in his cell and berates him for what He has done—not only in reappearing, but in His original cruelty to Man. The accusation is detailed and constitutes a little treatise on political science and the Christian faith.
The Inquisitor harks back to the three temptations with which the Devil tried to make Christ one of his own: first offering bread to Him who was starving in the desert; then urging that He throw Himself down from a height to show Himself miraculously saved; lasdy displaying the empires of the earth, to tempt Him with power. In rejecting all these, says the Inquisitor, Christ reaffirmed through his own person Man's gift of freedom; human conscience chooses without compulsion or limitation.
But, says the Inquisitor, man is weak, confused, sinful, incapable of bearing such a burden. Seeing this heardess imposition, some wise men among the mass of mankind have taken the burden on themselves of giving the rest what they need to be at ease; the agency is the hierarchy of the church. It provides bread. Man needs it but does not live by bread alone; the weak and wayward conscience needs certainties; it wants miracle, mystery, and authority.
These also the church supplies. Man's final desire is unity, the peace of knowing that all think and feel alike. And this boon is on the way to realization, thanks to thought-control and the irresistible appeal of the other gifts, especially bread.
Throughout the harangue, Christ has been silent and gendy smiling. But the Inquisitor is not through. Not only has Christ harmed God's creatures by making them free, He has imposed on the wise—the 100,000 on earth who run the great deception—an intolerable burden. They live in sadness, deprived of their freedom in keeping up the show—"correcting His work"— not from love of power but out of pity for Man.
Now and then during the indictment Alyosha protests against the meaning Ivan puts on the gospel and the church. Ivan loves his brother and does not argue with him but quiedy continues.
Although the smiling Christ says not a word, the drama built up among these four is intense. How it is resolved need not be set down, for it is the dilemma that relates to our concern. [The resume should tempt to reading the masterpiece, which is in part II, book V, chapter V of The Brothers Karamazov. Separate editions of The Grand Inquisitor are also available.]
That Russia was the country where the Inquisitor's scheme of bread and mystery was attempted under the name of Communism would not have surprised Ivan's creator. The tradition of ruthless authority and total unity went back to Peter the Great; the emancipation of the serfs and the beginnings of industry were too recent to have developed different habits, and the rebel intelligentsia, lacking political skill, had been repeatedly put down.
Bread ensured obedience to the Soviets as in the Spanish allegory, but the Inquisitor's 100,000 were not matched in efficiency and the regime broke down over bread, not ideas.
The late 20C welfare states of the West are not Communist Russia or Seville in the 16C, but some of the aims and devices are not unlike.
The desire for security on the part of the population is the same, coupled though it is with a desire for freedom. This combination, as the Inquisitor implies is self-contradictory and probably unworkable.