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Word Gems 

exploring self-realization, sacred personhood, and full humanity

Kenneth Clark's Civilisation 

Chapter 8 

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... a revolutionary change in thought -- the revolution that replaced Divine Authority by experience, experiment and observation.

I am in Holland not only because Dutch painting is a visible expression of this change of mind, but because Holland -- economically and intellectually -- was the first country to profit from the change.

• When one begins to ask the question, "does it work?" or even, "does it pay?" instead of, "is it God's will?" one gets a new set of answers, and one of the first of them is this: that to try to suppress opinions which one doesn't share is much less profitable than to tolerate them.

This conclusion should have been reached during the Reformation -- it was implicit in the writings of Erasmus who was, of course, a Dutchman. Alas, a belief in the divine authority of our own opinions afflicted the Protestants just as much as the Catholics -- even in Holland. They continued to persecute each other right up to the middle of the seventeenth century...

• Still, when all this is said, the spirit of Holland in the early seventeenth century was remarkably tolerant; and one proof is that nearly all the great books which revolutionised thought were first printed in Holland.

What sort of society was it that allowed these intellectual time-bombs to be set off in its midst? ...

... out of all the too numerous group-portraits of early seventeenth century Holland, something does emerge which has a bearing on civilisation:

• these are individuals who are prepared to join in a corporate effort for the public good... They are the first visual evidence of bourgeois democracy.

Dreadful words -- so debased by propaganda that I hesitate to use them. Yet in the context of civilisation they have a real meaning. They mean that a group of individuals can come together and take corporate responsibility; that they can afford to do so because they have some leisure; and that they have some leisure because they have some money in the bank. This is the society which you see in the portrait groups. They represent the practical, social application of the philosophy that things must be made to work.

Amsterdam was the first centre of bourgeois capitalism. It had become ... the great international port of the north and the chief banking centre of Europe... there is no doubt that at a certain stage in social development fluid capital is one of the chief causes of civilisation because it ensures three essential ingredients: leisure, movement and independence...

In studying the history of civilisation one must try to keep a balance between individual genius and the moral or spiritual condition of a society. However, irrational it may seem, I believe in genius. I believe that almost everything of value which has happened in the world has been due to individuals. Nevertheless, one can't help feeling that the supremely great figures in history -- Dante, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Newton, Goethe -- must be to some extent a kind of summation of their times. They are too large, too all-embracing, to have developed in isolation.

Rembrandt is a crucial instance of this conundrum... there was no one else in Holland remotely comparable to him... Yet the very fact that he was so immediately and overwhelmingly successful ... shows that the spiritual life of Holland needed him and so had, to some extent, created him...

• Rembrandt reinterpreted sacred history and mythology in the light of human experience. But it is an emotional response based on a belief in the truth of revealed religion...

There is no doubt that in its first glorious century the appeal to reason and experience was a triumph for the human intelligence. Between Descartes and Newton western man created those instruments of thought that set him apart from the other peoples of the world. And if you look at the average nineteenth-century historian you will find that to him European civilisation seems almost to begin with this achievement.

• The strange thing is that none of these mid-nineteenth-century writers (except for Carlyle and Ruskin) seemed to notice that the triumph of rational philosophy had resulted in a new form of barbarism...

... I see, stretching as far as the eye can reach, the squalid disorder of industrial society. It has grown up as a result of the same conditions that allowed the Dutch to build their beautiful towns and support their painters and print the works of philosophers: fluid capital, a free economy, a flow of exports and imports, a dislike of interference, a belief in cause and effect.

• Every civilisation seems to have its nemesis, not only because the first bright impulses become tarnished by greed and laziness, but because of unpredictables -- and in this case the unpredictable was the growth of population, The greedy became greedier, the ignorant lost touch with traditional skills, and the light of experience narrowed its beam so that a grand design [a noble work] would now be thought of as a waste of money...