|
Word Gems
exploring self-realization, sacred personhood, and full humanity
Kenneth Clark's Civilisation
Chapter 10
return to previous page
The busts of the successful dramatists of eighteenth-century Paris stand in the foyer of the Comedie Francaise, the national theatre of France, which, strange as it may seem to us today, did a great deal, for a hundred years, to promote good sense and humanity. What witty, intelligent faces!
And here is the wittiest and most intelligent of them all; in fact, at a certain level, one of the most intelligent men that has ever lived, Voltaire. He is smiling, the smile of reason.
... the civilised smile of eighteenth-century France may be one of the things that have brought the whole concept of civilisation into disrepute. This is because we forgot that in the seventeenth century, with all its outpourings of genius in art and science, there were still senseless persecutions and brutal wars...
By 1700 people had begun to feel that a little calm and detachment wouldn't come amiss. The smile of reason may seem to betray a certain incomprehension of the deeper human emotions; but it didn't preclude some strongly held beliefs -- belief in natural law, belief in justice, belief in toleration. Not bad. The philosophers of the Enlightenment pushed European civilisation some steps up the hill... Up to the 1930s people were supposed not to burn witches and other members of minority groups [etc] ... Except, of course, during wars. This we owe to the movement known as the enlightenment, and above all to Voltaire.
Although the victory of reason and tolerance was won in France, it was initiated in England...
Eighteenth-century England was the paradise of the amateur, by which I mean, of men rich enough and grand enough to do whatever they liked, who nevertheless did things that require a good deal of expertise... In a way these ... amateurs were the inheritors of the Renaissance ideal of universal man... There was a freshness and freedom of mind in these men that is sometimes lost in the rigidly controlled classifications of the professional...
In talking about the twelfth and thirteenth centuries I said how great an advance in civilisation was then achieved by a sudden consciousness of feminine qualities; and the same was true of eighteenth-century France. I think it absolutely essential to civilisation that the male and female principles be kept in balance...
A margin of wealth is helpful to civilisation, but for some mysterious reason great wealth is destructive. I suppose that, in the end, splendour is dehumanising, and a certain sense of limitation seems to be a condition of what we call good taste...
-
The men who met each other in the salons of Madame du Deffand and Madame Geofrin were engaged on a great work -- an encyclopedia or Dictionnaire Raisonne des Sciences, des Arts et des Metiers. It was intended to advance mankind by conquering ignorance... But authoritarian governments don't like dictionaries. They live by lies and bamboozling abstractions, and can't afford to have words accurately defined. The Encyclopedia was twice suppressed...
The Renaissance had taken place within the framework of the Christian church...
-
By the middle of the eighteenth century serious-minded men could see that the Church had become a tied house -- tied to property and status and defending its interests by repression and injustice. No one felt this more strongly than Voltaire... So the eighteenth century was faced with the troublesome task of constructing a new morality, without revelation or Christian sanctions.
This morality was built on two foundations: one of them was the doctrine of natural law; the other was the stoic morality of ancient republican Rome...
... the new morality had already inspired a revolution outside Europe... Here on the border territory of the Indian, a young Virginian lawyer elected in the 1760s to build his home. His name was Thomas Jefferson and he called his house Monticello...
Monticello was the beginning of that simple ... classicism that stretches right up the eastern seaboard of America...
How confidently in their semi-wild domain the Founding Fathers of America assumed their mantle of republican virtue, and put into practise the notions of the French Enlightenment...
"Self-evident truths" ... that's the voice of eighteenth century enlightenment...
|