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Word Gems
exploring self-realization, sacred personhood, and full humanity
Kenneth Clark's Civilisation
Chapter 6
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The dazzling summit of human achievement represented by Michelangelo, Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci lasted for less than twenty years.
It was followed (except in Venice) by a time of uneasiness often ending in disaster. For the first time since the great thaw civilised values were questioned and defied, and for some years it looked as if the footholds won by the Renaissance --
had been lost. Yet this was an inevitable process, and out of the confusion and brutality of the sixteenth-century Europe, man emerged with new faculties and expanded powers of thought and expression...
[Artwork depicting northern Germans reveals] a serious personal piety... a serious approach to life itself. These [Catholic] men were not to be fobbed off by forms and ceremonies...
What they heard from Papal legates ... did not convince them that there was the same desire for truth in Rome...
Erasmus had seen enough of the religious life to know that the Church must be reformed... the great civiliser of Europe was aground, stranded on forms and vested interests...
[Printing invented in 1455]
It took preachers ... almost thirty years to recognize what a formidable new instrument had come into their hands, just as it took politicians twenty years to recognize the value of television.
The first man to take full advantage of the printing press was Erasmus... in a way he became the first journalist... He poured out pamphlets... Early in his career he produced a masterpiece -- the Praise of Folly...
To an intelligent man, human beings and human institutions really are intolerably stupid and there are times when his pent-up feelings of impatience and annoyance can't be contained any longer. Erasmus' Praise of Folly was a dam-burst of this kind; it washed away everything: popes, kings, monks, scholars, war, theology -- the whole lot...
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This is the first time in history that a bright-minded intellectual exercise -- something to make people stretch their minds, and think for themselves, and question everything -- was made available to thousands of readers all over Europe.
However, it was not Erasmus' wit and satire that made him, for ten years, the most famous man in Europe, but rather his appeal to earnest, pious, truth-seeking state of mind [of the northern Germans]...
H.G. Wells once made a distinction between communities of obedience and communities of will; he thought that the first produced the stable societies like Egypt and Mesopotamia; the original homes of civilisation, and that the second produced the restless nomads of the north. He may have been right... The community of will which we call the Reformation was basically a popular movement... And so Protestantism became destructive [of images in the Roman churches]... the existence of these incomprehensible values enraged them.
But it had to happen.
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If civilisation was not to wither, or petrify, like the societies of ancient Egypt, it had to draw life from deeper roots than those which had nourished the intellectual and artistic triumphs of the Renaissance. And ultimately a new civilisation was created -- but it was a civilisation not of the image, but of the word.
There can be no thought without words. Luther gave his countrymen words ... [he] gave people not only a chance to read Holy Writ for themselves, but the tools of thought. And the medium of printing was there to make it accessible. The translations of the Bible ... were crucial in the development of the western mind; and if I hesitate to say to the development of civilisation, it is because they were also a stage in the growth of nationalism, and ... nearly all the steps upward in civilisation have been made in periods of internationalism.
But whatever the long-term effects of Protestantism, the immediate results were very bad: not only bad for art, but bad for life. The North was full of bully boys who rampaged the country and took any excuse to beat people up... It's a terrible thought that so-called wars of religion, religion of course being used as a pretext for political ambitions ... went on for one hundred and twenty years...
... Montaigne ... had no illusions about the effect of the religious convictions released by the Reformation. "In trying to make themselves angels, " he said, "men transform themselves into beasts."
[Shakespeare contemplating these atrocities expressed pessimism regarding mankind:] ... who else has felt so strongly the absolute meaninglessness of human life?
[quote from Hamlet:]
"... and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot; full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
How unthinkable before the break-up of the Christendom, the tragic split that followed the Reformation;
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