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11 Sep 18
ronald fullerWhy did the Renaissance occur? This is a difficult question at best -- there are no easy answers. In general, however, we could argue that the ordered, formalistic, and compartmentalized society of the Middle Ages allowed those forces which had created it to destroy it as well.
hakespearean characters live by their humanity, oblivious to the logic chopping of an Aristotle or Aquinas. -
04 Oct 13
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The 12th century Renaissance, characterized as it was by the by the spirit of inquiry and skepticism of Peter Abelard (see Lecture 1), is much more deserving of that label. And when we think of the Renaissance today, we perhaps think of tangible images like sculpture, painting and architecture.
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de Medici,
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we could argue that the ordered, formalistic, and compartmentalized society of the Middle Ages allowed those forces which had created it to destroy it as well.
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It was too damn logical. Too systematic. Too Aristotelian. And the Renaissance reacted strongly against the medieval matrix -- against all that pigeon-holing.
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The medieval synthesis had grown formal, too compartmentalized, too confining.
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The new world view -- at least part of it -- would be fashioned according to the reigning two ideals of the period:
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individuality and self-sufficiency.
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Although Europe was slow to recover from the ravages of the Black Death between 1347 and 1351
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by the middle of the fifteenth century, finance, commerce, agriculture and industry were all on the upswing.
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city-dwelling merchant whose wealth grew even more
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Italy, Germany, the Low Countries and in England
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Bankers financed mines, manufacturing and sheep-raising and the great merchants began to move beyond the confines of the medieval guild system. Commerce sought new markets in North and South America and India.
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Trade in luxuries began to give way to trade in staple commodities.
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In the face of this economic reality, the old city guilds and all the regulations and restrictions attached to them were beginning to prove inadequate.
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The Church's role as temporal arbiter was challenged. Merchants needed firm and stable governments free from older feudal obligations so it is no accident that it was during the Renaissance that strong, centralized monarchies make their appe
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The new urban leaders were the middle classes, the bourgeoisie, and not the bishops.
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arance.
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While many retained their faith in life after death -- indeed, most people did so -- there was a coincident desire to enjoy the benefits of this world now.
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St. Augustine (354-430) would have been most disappointed. If his artificial dichotomy of the Two Worlds meant anything, it was that the City of God was superior in all ways to the City of Man.
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here in the classical world they found people who had the same passion for a free life in the world of Nature. The Renaissance passion for what was human and the discovery or rediscovery of this same inclination in the classical world we today call HUMANISM.
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Christianity had spent the past fourteen centuries erasing this pagan and secular concern among its flock. Although the Church Fathers had to read and understand this pagan literature, they at the same time rejected its message. Or did they? Was it really possible for them to have not paid any attention to the content of what they read while they were seeking to improve the style of their writing? I think not. And as much as the Fathers may have complained about the paganism of the ancients, the ideas implicit within the ancient works became part of their thinking. In this way, classical humanism more or less slipped through the back door of medieval Christian literature.
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Aquinas was no ascetic in the mold of Augustine. Citified intellectual that he was, he did not deny himself the pleasures of earthly existence. His entire philosophy was grounded in the supremacy of that most human of man's qualities -- Human Reason.
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With the Renaissance, Europe learned from its past and borrowed what was deemed most useful. Of course, why the Renaissance had to go back to the past to find what was useful for the present is important.
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I think the answer is quite simple: in order to escape the present -- "shameful vision this. We must awake or die"
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The key to the present and the future then, lay in the virtues of the golden age of the classical world.
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The present disappointed them.
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Petrarch was more interested in the glories of this world. But, he looked backward, and found in Cicero a lamentation for the present. In other words, the meaning of the Renaissance came from the classical past.
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By 1500, Europe contained in excess of nine million volumes, of thirty thousand titles all of which came off the presses of more than one thousand printers. In 1451, Johannes Gutenberg (1397-1468) and Johannes Fust went into partnership and produced a forty-two line Bible and a thirty-two line Latin Grammar -- one text was religious, the other secular. By 1465, printing presses based on Gutenberg's moveable type could be found in Italy, by 1470 in Paris. London followed in 1480. By 1499, there were presses in Stockholm, Constantinople and Lisbon. The consequences of the PRINTING PRESS were so immense that I hardly need to even explain why. The great age of information was produced by the Renaissance. And today we are totally bombarded with information. The primary effect of this boom in printing in the 15th century was that printed books began to fall into the hands of people who were not intellectuals. The effect was profound and perhaps without parallel.
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20 Sep 13
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The Renaissance was clearly marked by vast economic changes. Although Europe was slow to recover from the ravages of the Black Death between 1347 and 1351, by the middle of the fifteenth century, finance, commerce, agriculture and industry were all on the upswing. Commerce demanded a money economy in place of the older barter system. And the restrictive practices of the guild system, at least in western Europe, were already showing signs of breakdown. All of this, of course, would be supported by the massive influx of gold and silver bullion into Europe which the eventual exploitation of the world across the Atlantic would make possible in the early 16th century. Kings and their nobility, of course, grew wealthier. But on a comparative level, it was the city-dwelling merchant whose wealth grew even more. Italy, Germany, the Low Countries and in England were the main beneficiaries of the wealth that flowed into Europe during the first wave of overseas empire. Bankers financed mines, manufacturing and sheep-raising and the great merchants began to move beyond the confines of the medieval guild system. Commerce sought new markets in North and South America and India.
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18 Sep 13
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We may even think of the de Medici, that powerful Italian family of bankers and purveyors of political intrigue
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sculpture, painting and architecture.
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xploration of the New World and the exploitation of that world
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perfection of moveable type by a German print master by the name of Gutenberg.
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the ordered, formalistic, and compartmentalized society of the Middle Ages allowed those forces which had created it to destroy it as well
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outgrew the fixed and narrow framework through which they functioned
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a surplus of agricultural produce, the increasing urbanization of Europe, a swelling population, wider trading zones and a thirst for knowledge
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was too damn logical. Too systematic. Too Aristotelian.
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medieval synthesis
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By 1500 and in whatever field of endeavor we choose to examine -- art, politics, science, economics, life -- there is greater emphasis placed on human potentiality for growth and excellence
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individuality and self-sufficiency.
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by the middle of the fifteenth century, finance, commerce, agriculture and industry were all on the upswing
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Petrarch,
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extraordinary intellectual event or movement.
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Peter Abelard
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Medici
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Gutenberg.
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fixed and narrow framework
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a surplus of agricultural produce, the increasing urbanization of Europe
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a thirst for knowledge
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since the classical age of Greece
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formal, too compartmentalized, too confining
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emphasis placed on human potentiality for growth and excellence
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individuality and self-sufficiency
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recover from the ravages of the Black Death
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in place of the older barter system
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demanded a money economy
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centralized government
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regulations and restrictions attached to them were beginning to prove inadequate
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the bourgeoisie, and not the bishops
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new urban leaders were the middle classes,
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passion for a free life in the world of Nature
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troubadours and wandering scholars
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a Holy Crusade to stamp out the Cathari as well as the Goliards
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Scholasticism, that great medieval combination of Theology and Philosophy,
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science and philosophy were joined together.
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Marsilio Ficino
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hirst for knowledge.
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spread across Europe
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Realities such as a surplus of agricultural produce, the increasing urbanization of Europe, a swelling population, wider trading zones and a thirst for knowledge finally broke the stranglehold of the medieval matrix. Man emerged from the fragments of the medieval synthesis and saw, perhaps for the first time since the classical age of Greece, the world of Man and the world of Nature.
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In other words, the medieval matrix held the seeds of its own decline.
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There they found their "renaissance," as GIORGIO VASARI (1511-1574)would put it.
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two ideals of the period: individuality and self-sufficiency.
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by the middle of the fifteenth century, finance, commerce, agriculture and industry were all on the upswing.
-
The Church's role as temporal arbiter was challenged.
-
While many retained their faith in life after death -- indeed, most people did so -- there was a coincident desire to enjoy the benefits of this world now
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individuals who felt these interests the most had an ancient literature to which they could turn and find purpose
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The Renaissance passion for what was human and the discovery or rediscovery of this same inclination in the classical world we today call HUMANISM
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Throughout the central and high middle ages we can discern a literature which abounds in the frank enjoyment of life and its pleasures.
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The key to the present and the future then, lay in the virtues of the golden age of the classical world.
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Petrarch was more interested in the glories of this world. But, he looked backward, and found in Cicero a lamentation for the present.
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Petrarch and Ficino were urban representatives of the very urban phenomenon we call the Renaissance.
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ll, they found the tools of textual criticism. They found Latin grammar and the found the passion of the scholar.
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The existence of the matrix and the rediscovery of ancient ways of thought produced tension and conflict. A crisis of identity was the result.
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So much did the Florentine scholars admire Plato that the de Medici family rebuilt Plato's Academy.
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Their ideal was excellence, moral and intellectual excellence. And the ancient Greeks had a word for this quality: arete. The virtue of excellence and the excellence of virtue. Be healthy in mind and in body. Seek virtue. Live the good life. Explore all potentialities. Serve the civitas. This is Platonic idea of paideia, what we today call culture.
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And in his treatise, On Pleasure, he placed himself with the Epicureans who placed the highest good in peaceful pleasures. He declared that the prostitute is better than the nun because she makes men happy while the nun lives in the cloistered world of the nunnery.
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The artist is the true philosopher in that he re-creates nature
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it can be argued that the Renaissance of the 14th and 15th centuries was not indicative of an extraordinary intellectual event or movement.
-
when we think of the Renaissance today, we perhaps think of tangible images like sculpture, painting and architecture.
-
the ordered, formalistic, and compartmentalized society of the Middle Ages allowed those forces which had created it to destroy it as well.
-
These forces developed to such an extent that they outgrew the fixed and narrow framework through which they functioned. In other words, the medieval matrix held the seeds of its own decline.
-
immediate past which they arrogantly assumed was "dark,
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Renaissance men and women turned their gaze backward in historical time.
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classical past of ancient Greece and Rome, which they assumed was bathed in light.
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found a Golden Age. There they found thinkers who had similar interests and who had wrestled perhaps, with identical problems. There they found their "renaissance," as GIORGIO VASARI (1511-1574)would put it.
-
By 1500 and in whatever field of endeavor we choose to examine -- art, politics, science, economics, life -- there is greater emphasis placed on human potentiality for growth and excellence. The new world view -- at least part of it -- would be fashioned according to the reigning two ideals of the period: individuality and self-sufficiency.
-
Europe was slow to recover from the ravages of the Black Death between 1347 and 1351
-
by the middle of the fifteenth century, finance, commerce, agriculture and industry were all on the upswing. Commerce demanded a money economy in place of the older barter system.
-
Renaissance was clearly marked by vast economic changes
-
it was the city-dwelling merchant whose wealth grew even more
-
The new urban leaders were the middle classes, the bourgeoisie, and not the bishops.
-
The Church's role as temporal arbiter was challenged.
-
-
he Renaissance passion for what was human and the discovery or rediscovery of this same inclination in the classical world we today call HUMANISM.
-
in the classical world they found people who had the same passion for a free life in the world of Nature.
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Of course, why the Renaissance had to go back to the past to find what was useful for the present is important. Why is it that this forward-looking age, this period of rebirth and rediscovery, needed to justify itself according to ancient models?
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With the Renaissance, Europe learned from its past and borrowed what was deemed most useful.
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in order to escape the present -- "shameful vision this. We must awake or die" -- Renaissance humanists had to find a precedent elsewhere.
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The key to the present and the future then, lay in the virtues of the golden age of the classical world.
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Petrarch himself was impressed with the ancients. "Among the many subjects which interested me," he wrote in his Letter to Posterity, "I dwelt especially upon antiquity, for our own age has always repelled me…. In order to forget my own time I have constantly striven to place myself in a spirit of other ages, and consequently, I delight in history."
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The consequences of the PRINTING PRESS were so immense that I hardly need to even explain why. The great age of information was produced by the Renaissance. And today we are totally bombarded with information. The primary effect of this boom in printing in the 15th century was that printed books began to fall into the hands of people who were not intellectuals. The effect was profound and perhaps without parallel.
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What the Renaissance scholars really discovered was a great authority with whom they could arm themselves against the compartmentalization of the medieval matrix. The existence of the matrix and the rediscovery of ancient ways of thought produced tension and conflict. A crisis of identity was the result. Who are we, asked the Renaissance scholar? And out of this conflict, Renaissance scholars began to discover the beauty of form and they found Plato. So much did the Florentine scholars admire Plato that the de Medici family rebuilt Plato's Academy.
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Most of what Renaissance humanists borrowed from Socrates, Plato and Cicero was their happy, natural and wholesome enjoyment of human life.
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All of this -- and quite a bit more -- meant a revolt from the medieval Christian ethic. In place of obedience to God's will came the freedom and responsibility of the individual guided by human reason. In place of faith came the fearless, intrepid quest of intellect. For instance, one of the keenest and most daring of the Italian humanists was Lorenzo Valla (1405-1457). It was Valla who attacked the Donation of Constantine -- upon which the papacy grounded its claim to temporal authority -- as a forged document.
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In Italy, humanists were inspired by a revulsion to Christianity bordering on paganism.
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Through two giants, Gargantua and Pantagruel, Rabelais satirizes the Church, universities, the monastic orders, theologians, lawyers and philosophers. With the characters of Rabelais, and Erasmus' famous work Praise of Folly, the conflict between the Age of Faith and the Age of Man is fought out and parodied.
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And William Shakespeare (1564-1616) peopled his world with an infinite variety of social and psychological types. He highlights the human condition -- the condition of all. Even his language is unlordly -- his poetry is full of the Rabelaisian gusto of living life in its fullest.
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The overwhelming concern of the 13th century was God. The overwhelming concern of the Renaissance is Man.
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Marlowe's Faustus, his Tamburlaine, yearn for the chance to know, to do, to feel everything -- they crave that vague thing, still unknown, but which, when found, yields earthly power. Not science, not wisdom, not the revelation of an understanding mind not a Platonic Form -- instead, yearning for an enhancement of personality that comes with power.
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But power -- to what end is this power? For Francis Bacon (1561-1626), the true epitome of all that was Faust, knowledge is power.
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Erasmus, despite both his faults and his virtues, is the ideal humanist. Dare I say it, the penultimate Renaissance man. He didn't care for the art of his own generation, he was unconcerned with the discovery of the New World and was bitterly hostile to the emergent new science. Instead, he typifies a humanism which worshipped a Roman Cicero rather than the fathers of Cicero, the Greeks. He is not responsible for original thinking -- he made no new discoveries. The best of the past, not the nascent future, was his main concern. He stood for tolerance and mediation, not the courageousness required to face forward. He was not the equal of one of his contemporaries, Martin Luther (1483-1546). Yet, Erasmus' virtues were indeed great.
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He was the most civilized man of his age. He was at home in the age of Augustus, Horace, Ovid, Virgil and Cicero. His Rotterdam, London or Basel sometimes amused him but at other times, the city filled him with pity and indignation. Just the same -- his remedy fell on deaf ears. The glorification of antiquity and his rational Christian ethics did not impress his contemporaries. But, he managed to Christianize the Renaissance -- he humanized Christianity.
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When Erasmus died in 1536, northern humanism was showing signs of depletion. Humanism, now rejected by both the priests of the old matrix as well as the prophets of the new, seemed less significant in the face of the Copernican revolution and the age of religious wars which Luther and John Calvin (1509-1564) helped to make a reality.
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In retrospect, the ideal of individual perfection which underlies the Renaissance, is aristocratic, and as such, exclusive.
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Since the 1860s when the Swiss art historian Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897), published his Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy in two volumes, it has been the fashion to regard the essence of the Renaissance as "the rediscovery of the world and of the natural man."
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This is far too simple
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the reason being that any semi-intensive study of the period known as the Renaissance reveals numerous intellectual and cultural cross-currents that defy our penchant for pigeon-holing. Humanistic values, Thomism, Augustinianism, paganism, mysticism and the new science exist side by side with one another. But, I think the one value all these currents perhaps share is an increasing individualism, an increasing impatience with the older medieval forms of social organization. This individualism was perhaps a natural reflex of an economy bursting forth from its medieval limitations. Feudalism, at least in northern and western Europe, sealed its own fate by its very existence. And the guild system, as I've already mentioned, seemed to have dug its own grave. In the wake of economic and social changes came changes in the way the individual thought about the world.
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When all was said and done, Aristotelian logic was a closed book -- a dead end. However, for all its cultural brilliance, and few would deny the cultural brilliance of this great age of art and sculpture, the Renaissance was more a movement of feelings and shifting values.
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Thinkers clearly began to think for themselves rather than conform and the general reaction was certainly a rejection of the Scholastic logic-choppers.
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One final point is worth mentioning. Renaissance scholars discovered a new purpose for mankind. That purpose was revealed by human history. The expression Renaissance was not invented by Burckhardt or any other historian -- instead, the word was realized by the scholars of the Renaissance. The Renaissance scholars then, made the Renaissance a reality. They looked both backward to the classical past and forward to an unknown future.
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17 Sep 13
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it can be argued that the Renaissance of the 14th and 15th centuries was not indicative of an extraordinary intellectual event or movement
-
there are no easy answers
-
These forces developed to such an extent that they outgrew the fixed and narrow framework through which they functioned
-
Realities such as a surplus of agricultural produce, the increasing urbanization of Europe, a swelling population, wider trading zones and a thirst for knowledge finally broke the stranglehold of the medieval matrix
-
perhaps for the first time since the classical age of Greece, the world of Man and the world of Nature
-
to the classical past of ancient Greece and Rome
-
turned their gaze backward in historical time.
-
There they found a Golden Age.
-
had grown formal, too compartmentalized, too confining.
-
there is greater emphasis placed on human potentiality for growth and excellence
-
by the middle of the fifteenth century, finance, commerce, agriculture and industry were all on the upswing.
-
ommerce demanded a money economy in place of the older barter system
-
it was the city-dwelling merchant whose wealth grew even more.
-
Trade in luxuries began to give way to trade in staple commodities
-
he new urban leaders were the middle classes, the bourgeoisie, and not the bishops
-
A thoroughgoing intellectual reconstruction was now a reality
-
The new interest focused on man and his life in the here and now.
-
here was a coincident desire to enjoy the benefits of this world now
-
most had an ancient literature to which they could turn and find purpose
-
we today call HUMANISM
-
lassical humanism more or less slipped through the back door of medieval Christian literature.
-
uch as the Fathers may have complained about the paganism of the ancients, the ideas implicit within the ancient works became part of their thinking
-
we can discern a literature which abounds in the frank enjoyment of life and its pleasures.
-
His entire philosophy was grounded in the supremacy of that most human of man's qualities -- Human Reason.
-
Of course, why the Renaissance had to go back to the past to find what was useful for the present is importan
-
I think the answer is quite simple: in order to escape the present
-
The present disappointed them.
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"How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?" asked the medieval Scholastic. We can only imagine Petrarch's response -- "who cares?"
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So Petrarch turned from Aristotle to Plato. But why? Well, simple. Plato was not Aristotle. The lyrical, poetic, soulful Plato was the antithesis of the logical, scientific, unemotional Aristotle. Plato was not only the antithesis of Aristotle, he was the antidote to Aristotle.
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There was the world of Florence -- a city where science and philosophy were joined together. Florence -- a city like no other.
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By 1500, Europe contained in excess of nine million volumes, of thirty thousand titles all of which came off the presses of more than one thousand printers. In 1451, Johannes Gutenberg (1397-1468) and Johannes Fust went into partnership and produced a forty-two line Bible and a thirty-two line Latin Grammar -- one text was religious, the other secular.
-
The great age of information was produced by the Renaissance. And today we are totally bombarded with information. The primary effect of this boom in printing in the 15th century was that printed books began to fall into the hands of people who were not intellectuals. The effect was profound and perhaps without parallel.
-
enaissance scholars began to discover the beauty of form and they found Plato
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he de Medici family rebuilt Plato's Academy
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his attempt to find a universal religion grounded in the fantastic combination of Plato's Ideas, the Jewish Kabbala and Christianity.
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Plato seemed to be the thinker of the hour. He was more poetic, more lyrical and, so Renaissance scholars believed, was easily reconcilable with Christianity.
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His logic chopping proved little more than that it was logical.
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hat good was this information?
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their happy, natural and wholesome enjoyment of human lif
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e healthy in mind and in body. Seek virtue. Live the good life. Explore all potentialities. Serve the civitas. This is Platonic idea of paideia, what we today call culture.
-
Their ideal was excellence, moral and intellectual excellence
-
In place of obedience to God's will came the freedom and responsibility of the individual guided by human reason.
-
He declared that the prostitute is better than the nun because she makes men happy while the nun lives in the cloistered world of the nunnery.
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In Italy, humanists were inspired by a revulsion to Christianity bordering on paganism
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There is no doubt that the Renaissance cultivated every natural tendency within the fine arts.
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Like Leonardo, the bastard child genius from Vinci, they studied not the surface, but the soul and structure of things.
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Flemish art betrays a "nouveau riche" aping of the grace and luxury of the very wealth
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The Flemish truly loved the life they saw around them and represented this in their art
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He highlights the human condition -- the condition of all.
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hakespeare's characters are mortal but they do not struggle with philosophies or theologies.
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Erasmus, despite both his faults and his virtues, is the ideal humanist. Dare I say it, the penultimate Renaissance man.
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The best of the past, not the nascent future, was his main concern.
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He is not responsible for original thinking -- he made no new discoveries.
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He was the most civilized man of his age.
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not the courageousness required to face forward
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When, however, Voltaire took up the pen left to him by Erasmus, he had something no scholar of the Renaissance had ever enjoyed -- the mighty ally of science. And not just science, but the grand philosophical synthesis provided by the mathematical genius of Isaac Newton
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What Erasmus had started with his pen, Voltaire finished with the aid of the Newtonian physical universe.
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he 14th and 15th century Renaissance, especially in northern Europe, tried to humanize Christianity
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that where the 12th century Renaissance made the attempt to Christianize humanity
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However, by the 17th century a third option was thrown into the mix -- the new science.
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the Renaissance was more a movement of feelings and shifting values.
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here was no systematic philosophy to emerge from the period. There is no Leonardoism, no Petrarchian philosophy.
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f anything, individualism perhaps meant the dissolution of systems.
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Shameful vision this. We must awake or die.
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the Renaissance was a profound act of rebellion and in the wake of protest, a new world was likely to emerge
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. Creativity has always existed -- but up to the Renaissance, bound firmly in the stranglehold of the medieval matrix.
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this individualism led to the glorification of creativi
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premium upon the individual and the capacity of the individual for improvement.
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Renaissance scholars discovered a new purpose for mankind. That purpose was revealed by human history.
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The future, although unknown, did admit of at least one thing -- it would be the work of real, living and breathing men. And that future would be bright -- it would be one of progress.
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fter one thousand years of Christian dogmatism, sectarianism, heresy and the authority of the Church, Renaissance thinkers and artists gazed proudly to the future
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When all is said and done, it can be argued that the Renaissance of the 14th and 15th centuries was not indicative of an extraordinary intellectual event or movement. The 12th century Renaissance, characterized as it was by the by the spirit of inquiry and skepticism of Peter Abelard (see Lecture 1), is much more deserving of that label. And when we think of the Renaissance today, we perhaps think of tangible images like sculpture, painting and architecture.
-
In general, however, we could argue that the ordered, formalistic, and compartmentalized society of the Middle Ages allowed those forces which had created it to destroy it as well.
-
Realities such as a surplus of agricultural produce, the increasing urbanization of Europe, a swelling population, wider trading zones and a thirst for knowledge finally broke the stranglehold of the medieval matrix. Man emerged from the fragments of the medieval synthesis and saw, perhaps for the first time since the classical age of Greece, the world of Man and the world of Nature.
-
individuality and self-sufficiency
-
Although Europe was slow to recover from the ravages of the Black Death between 1347 and 1351,
-
by the middle of the fifteenth century, finance, commerce, agriculture and industry were all on the upswing.
-
Commerce demanded a money economy in place of the older barter system.
-
ll of this, of course, would be supported by the massive influx of gold and silver bullion into Europe which the eventual exploitation of the world across the Atlantic would make possible in the early 16th century.
-
Trade began to show signs of change.
-
The Church's role as temporal arbiter was challenged.
-
ll HUMANISM.
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In this way, classical humanism more or less slipped through the back door of medieval Christian literature.
-
Pope Innocent III went on to lead a Holy Crusade to stamp out the Cathari as well as the Goliards.
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There was the world of Florence -- a city where science and philosophy were joined together. F
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That such is true of this our age [no one] will hardly doubt. For this century, like a golden age, has restored to light the liberal arts, which were almost extinct: grammar, poetry, rhetoric, painting, sculpture, architecture, music . . . and all this in Florence.
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The consequences of the PRINTING PRESS were so immense that I hardly need to even explain why. The great age of information was produced by the Renaissance. And today we are totally bombarded with information. The primary effect of this boom in printing in the 15th century was that printed books began to fall into the hands of people who were not intellectuals. The effect was profound and perhaps without parallel.
-
And out of this conflict, Renaissance scholars began to discover the beauty of form and they found Plato. So much did the Florentine scholars admire Plato that the de Medici family rebuilt Plato's Academy.
-
Plato seemed to be the thinker of the hour. He was more poetic, more lyrical and, so Renaissance scholars believed, was easily reconcilable with Christianity. In fact, I hope you are getting the major thrust of this argument for what the Renaissance was trying to accomplish, especially in its northern manifestation, was to reconcile the City of God with the City of Man. The result, as we shall see when we turn to some of the ideas of Erasmus, was Christian humanism.
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ristotle just had to go. I don't know how else to put it. His logic chopping proved little more than that it was logical. A fifty page demonstration of the proof that God's will was omnipotent, whether produced by an Aquinas or not, now seemed to mean very little. Once you knew how many angels could dance on the head of a pin, of what good was this information? There was more to life, it seemed, than logical argument and it was Plato who seemed to provide the necessary corrective.
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e healthy in mind and in body. Seek virtue. Live the good life. Explore all potentialities. Serve the civitas. This is Platonic idea of paideia, what we today call culture.
-
Their ideal was excellence, moral and intellectual excellence.
-
The virtue of excellence and the excellence of virtue.
-
n place of faith came the fearless, intrepid quest of intellect. For instance, one of the keenest and most daring of the Italian humanists was Lorenzo Valla (1405-1457). It was Valla who attacked the Donation of Constantine -- upon which the papacy grounded its claim to temporal authority -- as a forged document. At it was Valla who, in his brief work, The Monastic Life, denied any value to asceticism and holiness. And in his treatise, On Pleasure, he placed himself with the Epicureans who placed the highest good in peaceful pleasures. He declared that the prostitute is better than the nun because she makes men happy while the nun lives in the cloistered world of the nunnery.
-
All of this -- and quite a bit more -- meant a revolt from the medieval Christian ethic. In place of obedience to God's will came the freedom and responsibility of the individual guided by human reason. I
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Age of Faith and the Age of Man is fought out and parodied.
Very similar to the Rabelaisian gusto for life in it
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Taverns, drunken and obscene festivals, men caught in the act of urinating into a chamber pot, a skating party or middle class interiors -- all this and more. The Flemish truly loved the life they saw around them and represented this in their art.
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The overwhelming concern of the Renaissance is Man
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The overwhelming concern of the 13th century was God.
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In human hands, power destroys, craves, manipulates.
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he glorification of antiquity and his rational Christian ethics did not impress his contemporaries. But, he managed to Christianize the Renaissance -- he humanized Christianity. He wanted to wean men away from the mystery of faith and attach their pieties to civilized nature. "Saint Socrates, pray for me," he wrote.
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Humanism, now rejected by both the priests of the old matrix as well as the prophets of the new
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northern Europe shunned solitude as selfish, contemplation as idleness and a married and productive life as truly godly.
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Whereas the 13th century man or woman cast off their material wealth to embrace a holy life, in the Renaissance and after, we find the exact opposite. I imagine what all this boils down to saying is that where the 12th century Renaissance made the attempt to Christianize humanity, the 14th and 15th century Renaissance, especially in northern Europe, tried to humanize Christianity. Those were the choices one made. Those were the choices which remained. However, by the 17th century a third option was thrown into the mix -- the new science.
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But, I think the one value all these currents perhaps share is an increasing individualism
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So, it is fairly safe to say that the Renaissance, its cultural and intellectual merits considered together, placed a premium upon the individual and the capacity of the individual for improvement. And whether we consider an Italian merchant, a Sir Thomas More (1478-1535) or an Erasmus, this individualism led to the glorification of creativity. Creativity has always existed -- but up to the Renaissance, bound firmly in the stranglehold of the medieval matrix.
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In this view then, the Renaissance was a profound act of rebellion and in the wake of protest, a new world was likely to emerge.
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And that future would be bright -- it would be one of progress. Man was the intrepid explorer and after one thousand years of Christian dogmatism, sectarianism, heresy and the authority of the Church, Renaissance thinkers and artists gazed proudly to the future.
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it would be the work of real, living and breathing men.
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The man of God, resolute in his dogmatic opinions and asceticism -- fashioned by centuries of Church domination and synthesized by Aquinas -- had, by the 14th century, become godlike himself.
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These forces developed to such an extent that they outgrew the fixed and narrow framework through which they functioned. In other words, the medieval matrix held the seeds of its own decline.
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as GIORGIO VASARI (1511-1574)would put it. The medieval synthesis had grown formal, too compartmentalized, too confining. It was too damn logical. Too systematic. Too Aristotelian. And the Renaissance reacted strongly against the medieval matrix -- against all that pigeon-holing.
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Kings and their nobility, of course, grew wealthier. But on a comparative level, it was the city-dwelling merchant whose wealth grew even more. Italy, Germany, the Low Countries and in England were the main beneficiaries of the wealth that flowed into Europe during the first wave of overseas empire. Bankers financed mines, manufacturing and sheep-raising and the great merchants began to move beyond the confines of the medieval guild system. Commerce sought new markets in North and South America and India.
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The Renaissance passion for what was human and the discovery or rediscovery of this same inclination in the classical world we today call HUMANISM. Christianity had spent the past fourteen centuries erasing this pagan and secular concern among its flock.
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Europe learned from its past and borrowed what was deemed most useful. Of course, why the Renaissance had to go back to the past to find what was useful for the present is important.
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in order to escape the present -- "shameful vision this. We must awake or die" -- Renaissance humanists had to find a precedent elsewhere. The present disappointed them. The key to the present and the future then, lay in the virtues of the golden age of the classical world.
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The lyrical, poetic, soulful Plato was the antithesis of the logical, scientific, unemotional Aristotle.
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Petrarch and Ficino were urban representatives of the very urban phenomenon we call the Renaissance.
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By 1500, Europe contained in excess of nine million volumes, of thirty thousand titles all of which came off the presses of more than one thousand printers.
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By 1465, printing presses based on Gutenberg's moveable type could be found in Italy, by 1470 in Paris. London followed in 1480. By 1499, there were presses in Stockholm, Constantinople and Lisbon. The consequences of the PRINTING PRESS were so immense that I hardly need to even explain why.
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What the Renaissance scholars really discovered was a great authority with whom they could arm themselves against the compartmentalization of the medieval matrix.
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A crisis of identity was the result.
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Our destiny is not determined by anything outside us. God has bestowed upon us a unique distinction: the liberty to determine the form and value our lives shall acquire. In other words, man is the master of his own destiny.
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Most of what Renaissance humanists borrowed from Socrates, Plato and Cicero was their happy, natural and wholesome enjoyment of human life.
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Lorenzo Valla (1405-1457)
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He declared that the prostitute is better than the nun because she makes men happy while the nun lives in the cloistered world of the nunnery.
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In the humanistic spirit, Shakespeare's characters are mortal but they do not struggle with philosophies or theologies. Rather, their struggle is with the universal forces of nature that surely transcend philosophy -- whether Scholastic or otherwise.
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The overwhelming concern of the 13th century was God. The overwhelming concern of the Renaissance is Man.
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18 Feb 13
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With the Renaissance, Europe learned from its past and borrowed what was deemed most useful. Of course, why the Renaissance had to go back to the past to find what was useful for the present is important. Why is it that this forward-looking age, this period of rebirth and rediscovery, needed to justify itself according to ancient models? I think the answer is quite simple: in order to escape the present -- "shameful vision this. We must awake or die" -- Renaissance humanists had to find a precedent elsewhere. The present disappointed them. The key to the present and the future then, lay in the virtues of the golden age of the classical world.
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With the Renaissance, Europe learned from its past and borrowed what was deemed most useful. Of course, why the Renaissance had to go back to the past to find what was useful for the present is important. Why is it that this forward-looking age, this period of rebirth and rediscovery, needed to justify itself according to ancient models? I think the answer is quite simple: in order to escape the present -- "shameful vision this. We must awake or die" -- Renaissance humanists had to find a precedent elsewhere. The present disappointed them. The key to the present and the future then, lay in the virtues of the golden age of the classical world.
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21 Aug 08
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21 Nov 07
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21 Mar 07
Mr MaherExcellent article from Steve Kreis at the History Guide
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