By OSVALDO COGGIOLA*
In the Renaissance period, the universals of thought were reformulated through a tortuous path within the convulsive historical process that shaped the modern world.
1.
Our historical condition forces us to think about the past from the perspective of the present: in this way we are able to “read” the Renaissance and the Enlightenment as antecedents or drivers of bourgeois society and capitalism, establishing an invisible link to their protagonists. The risk involved in this operation is that of anachronism, linked to the accusation of “presentism”: the use of a contemporary framework to interpret history, identifying only its tendency to continue with the present, which certainly exists, but which represents only one of its possible dimensions.[I]
The advantage, which is also an obligation, is to distance oneself from the illusion or universalist and timeless pretension of past ideas.
Pierre Fougeyrollas referred to the “modernity that was born with the Renaissance, the Reformation and the conquest of the Americas”, characterized by five paradigms: (i) The market economy dominating the old subsistence economy; (ii) the progress of science and technology aiming at the domination of non-living and living matter; (iii) the secular efforts of public opinion to control political power, from the municipal to the national-state framework; (iv) the individual, and no longer the group, as the supreme value of social life; (v) the proclaimed preeminence of European cultures over all others.[ii]
These paradigms summarize the transition to modernity. However, isolating the “modern revolution” from its main processes (the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, the resurgence of the State – of which the absolutist State by divine right would be a step towards the emancipation of society from Heaven – the democratic revolutions), including its economic and social causes as a complementary factor; isolating it from the global context characterized by colonialism and slavery, can trace a history of ideas in Europe,[iii] but also lose the overall picture of the emergence of a new society.
The transition from feudalism towards a mercantile economy dominated by a new class, based on social relations that were different and opposed to those of the Ancien Régime, implied political and legal transformations that acted as instruments of economic and social transformations, without which these would not have occurred. The same impossibility would have occurred without changes in intellectual (or “mental”) frameworks.
These changes would put an end to the Ancien Régime, a society “characterized by a system of status, clearly delineated, which drew firm distinctions between people, and which made some superior and the majority inferior”,[iv] and the dispersion of power. The transition to a new society took place over a period of centuries. Feudal political fragmentation began to collapse with Otto I the Great, who reestablished a European empire, which began to witness a timid cultural “renaissance”. The reign of the first Holy Roman Emperor began in 962: from the beginning, he claimed to be the successor of Charlemagne, whose last heirs in Eastern France had died in 911.
He had the support of the German Church, with its powerful bishops and abbots; he intended to dominate the Church and use it as a unifying institution for the German lands, offering him power and protection against the nobles. The Church, on its side, offered him goods, military power and its monopoly on education:[v] “The Roman idea of the unity of civilized and Christian peoples under a single authority was established under Emperor Otto. At the same time, the last barbarian invasions were repelled, the bands of Saracens were expelled, the Normans established themselves in a stable manner in the North of France, the Hungarians, Poles, Bohemians and Scandinavians were baptized around the year 1000 and joined the great family of peoples who had received the seeds of Roman civilization by embracing Christianity. A certain order, resulting from the stabilization of the most important families, was introduced into feudalism; the first symptoms that announced the coming constitution of the communes began to manifest themselves.”[vi]
The establishment of a precarious “continental order” foreshadowed the decline of feudal particularism. This phenomenon was intertwined with other less visible ones. The basis of the changes was found in the sphere of production of social life, where slow changes were taking place: “Prepared by an obscure evolution, the signs of an awakening and general progress became visible from the middle of the 11th century. More numerous peasants learned to make better use of the soil, conquering vast territories over the forest, the prairie and the marsh.
The old cities grew with suburbs, and hundreds of new villages appeared. Society diversified, a certain prosperity spread. Education and culture progressed, the countryside was covered by an admirable series of sanctuaries. On the borders of Spain and Eastern Europe, a vigorous expansion was taking shape. States were organized, security was advancing. These symptoms were evident until the end of the 13th century, announcing a decisive change in the formation of Europe.”[vii]
Intellectual life did not remain oblivious to this, in the almost exclusive sphere in which it existed in the Middle Ages, the Church. Based on the never completely eclipsed classical culture, theologians emerged in abbeys and monasteries who began to try to base the truths of faith on the imperatives of reason, which meant, for the defenders of pure faith, giving Reason more importance than Revelation.
2.
In general, ideological changes form an organic whole with changes in all spheres of human action.[viii] In the transition to an individualistic society, dominated by the market and emancipated from the domination of religious faith, these changes had definite starting points, but their roots and scope were much broader. Recognizing their beginnings in Europe does not imply adopting a Eurocentric perspective. It was still in the High Middle Ages that the first debates and divisions that would lead to a new era emerged within the omnipresent medieval Christianity.
Religious controversy ran parallel to the first signs of the crisis of the feudal system and the social struggles that revealed this crisis. Around the year 1000, the debate of ideas began to cease to be the exclusive preserve of abbeys. Christian thinkers were divided: some began to express their trust in reason to understand the truths of faith, while others continued to appeal to the authority of the scriptures, the saints and the prophets, limiting the task of thought to the defense of revealed doctrines.
Among the first was Berengar of Tours (1000-1088), a schoolmaster at Chartres Cathedral, who became famous for preaching the use of reason and logic in the domains of faith, since these were a gift from God, stating that whoever did not resort to reason, thanks to which man is the image of God, would abandon his dignity. Friar Pier Damiani, on the other hand, denied the value of reasoning, stating that God was superior to the rules of reason.
The rationalist virus, however, had been unleashed: new ideas and behaviors had penetrated Christian institutions, with no way back. Set in the 12th century, the love and intellectual tragedy of Peter Abelard (a cleric and notable teacher, considered one of the most important thinkers of his time)[ix] and Heloísa, his brilliant student 22 years younger, who conceived a child illegitimately and ended up separated by the pulpit, the convent and religious persecution, limiting themselves to exchanging only correspondence throughout their last decades of life, symbolized on all levels (the physical and the spiritual, until then separated by an insurmountable barrier) the new era that was opening.
The questioning of the feudal-medieval order arose in its own institutions, but not only in them. Reason and scientific-philosophical studies found a powerful institutional embodiment that was born in the Church, but tended to become independent of it.
The university movement took shape in the 1088th century, with the founding of the University of Bologna (1221); before them, the basis of knowledge was in the Bible (pagan books were on the Vatican Index); the only institutions comparable to universities were monasteries that dedicated themselves to the study of theology, philosophy, literature and natural events, from the point of view of religion: “The schools, maintained and controlled by the bishops, reached their greatest development in the XNUMXth century and freed themselves from their tutelage. In a similar way to the bourgeoisie in the cities, teachers and students joined together, demanding for their 'university' the right to administer itself. In XNUMX, the University of Paris had its seal, in the manner of a community”.[X]
Universities originated as extensions of episcopal colleges, and were organized as corporations of students and professors who obtained their recognition from the Church in the form of sweet licentia[xi] (the universities in France arose from associations of teachers, those in Italy were made up of students). They organized a basic curriculum, with the “seven liberal arts”, divided into Trivium (grammar, dialectic and rhetoric) and quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music). The first universities were those of Paris, Bologna, Oxford and Cambridge.
Before the establishment of universities, there were already schools for training doctors, such as the one in Salerno, created in the 10th century, but it was only in the 13th century that these courses became part of universities, as did law courses.[xii] In the words of Juan Beneyto, “universities were born in cathedrals and their development was linked to the political life of Christianity.” The withdrawal of obedience to the Pope led to the prohibition in Spain of attending English universities that, like Oxford, had assumed freedom in teaching theology. Amid these tensions, which affected society as a whole, universities witnessed the renewed role of intellectuals in the Middle Ages; “this social class (sic) was never so well defined and self-aware as in the Middle Ages.”[xiii]
The elements of dissolution of the seigneurial order were seething within itself, and were also beginning to invade cultural production. Medieval invention reached its peak around the middle of the thirteenth century: “By the end of the thirteenth century, Europe had taken global scientific leadership from the wavering hands of Islam.”[xiv] As early as the 14th century, Filippo Brunelleschi revolutionized engineering and architecture, fusing art, craftsmanship and mathematics to build the dome of the cathedral of Florence. Philosophical thought did not remain aloof from this transformative wave.
Christian rationalism found its most important defender in Anselm of Canterbury (canonized as Saint Anselm), one of the founders of medieval scholasticism; he presented an ontological argument to prove the existence of God, defending the idea of an absolutely perfect being, a demonstration of himself. No being could arise from nothing: underlying all contingent beings there must be a necessary being.
Anselm's argument would be taken up by other Christian thinkers, but also by some of the greatest modern philosophers, such as Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz. Anselm distanced himself from Saint Augustine,[xv] arguing that freedom had been preserved by man despite original sin, which caused man to lose his freedom but not the capacity to be free, a condition that he could achieve (or recover) with the support of divine grace. Man's freedom, therefore, would not be limited by divine foreknowledge: God would foresee what man would do, but would also foresee that he would do it freely.
Scholasticism, which began in the 1225th century, saw the flowering of the greatest figures of Christian rationalism, such as Saint Thomas Aquinas (1274-XNUMX), described as the ideologist of a “passive revolution,” for whom philosophy and Christian faith were distinct but also harmonious. Theology was the supreme science, founded on divine revelation, and philosophy was its auxiliary, which was responsible for demonstrating the nature of divine existence in harmony with reason. The soul was the essential form of the body, responsible for giving it life, subsistent, immortal, and unique; man would naturally tend toward God.
Thomas Aquinas is considered the greatest medieval interpreter of Aristotle and the greatest philosopher of the Middle Ages. Nicolas de Oresme (1320-1382),[xvi] a century later, he was prominent among the thinkers of scholasticism, which “represents an orthodoxy in theology and an acceptance of the newly discovered Greek and Muslim philosophy and sciences, especially those of Aristotle; it reconciled faith and reason and organized all knowledge within theology, the supreme authority. It used a dialectical method and syllogistic reasoning to present its doctrines.
In economics, it codified the temporal laws and rules that served for centuries as a guide for commercial transactions.”[xvii] These advances coexisted with the clash between Christian rationalists and fideists: the intramural theological controversies anticipated transformations that would crack, and finally tear down, these same walls, not precisely with theological arguments or motives.
The symptoms of crisis in Christianity were turning into a seismic shock: in the final phase of the Middle Ages, the birth of a society based on the recognition of the individuality and autonomy of its members, on the dissolution of corporate orders and on the attack on ecclesiastical universalism, was made possible thanks to a series of mutations that had political antecedents.
The Italian Marsilius of Padua (1270-1342), in his Pacis Defender,[xviii] was among the first to postulate that state power should be delegated and exercised in the name of the popular will. Popular sovereignty, the principle of representation and the principle of majority were, in Marsilius of Padua, the framework of a new conception of society and its political structure. Marsilius affirmed that legislative power belonged to the people, considered as Civil University, depository of popular sovereignty.
Political authority did not come from God or the pope, but from the people; Marsilius of Padua argued that bishops should be elected by ecclesiastical assemblies and that the pope's power should be subordinated to the councils. He was one of the first scholars to distinguish and separate law from morality, declaring that the former related to civil life and the latter to conscience.
A new concept of State, independent of ecclesiastical authority, and implicitly secular, began to appear.[xx] It opened its way by seeking its legitimacy in past practices, presenting itself, as is often the case in revolutions, as a restoration (or “rebirth”) of a more or less distant past, which had suffered degradation in the immediate past. In this changing political context, the Renaissance originated.
3.
The term was coined in the 19th century, designating a historical rupture: “The Renaissance, due to its anthropocentric conception in contrast to medieval dualism, due to its proud and optimistic perception of a world to be entirely conquered, represented the first radical rupture with the Middle Ages, where there was no cultural space for the awareness of the universal and creative value of freedom, offered only in the form of privileges”.[xx]
The separation of body and soul, enshrined in the Middle Ages, had to be overthrown. The immanent fabric of humanist individualism was the turning away from the demonization of life and pleasure, and from every conception of life determined by the worldly intervention of Divine Providence. This rupture was identified mainly with Italy, for it was in this country that unprecedented stimuli for originality in thought and skepticism toward old traditions and authorities first arose, as well as the means to publicize and discuss these changes.
In the 15th century, in Florence, the movement took on a definite form, when, in the words of the architect, merchant and patron Leon Battista Alberti, men began to consider themselves the most graceful of animals and similar to immortal gods. From then on, the Renaissance spread throughout Europe, with the same strength as the works of art and the commercial impetus of the Florentines. The movement's link with the new emerging classes was evident through the patronage of new trends (especially in the visual arts) by wealthy merchants, who were establishing a solid and independent social position in cities enriched by trade and the development of manufacturing.
The artistic renewal/revolution acted as a powerful social battering ram. Renaissance art acted as a tool for the new rising class, the commercial bourgeoisie, and its worldview, based on an idea of the human being detached from divine intervention and its representatives on Earth. The individual began to have value outside the closed social body to which he belonged, “the creation of individuality was the contribution of the Renaissance and remained, without a doubt, the true contribution of Italian society to the subsequent era of modern civilization”.[xxx]
These changes had, as we shall see, extra-European influences and antecedents, and a long history within Europe itself. Ernst Cassirer stressed the importance and significance of symbolic forms in Renaissance art and philosophy, the transfer of Adam's motifs to those of Prometheus, as expressions of a new ideal of humanity.[xxiii] The Renaissance and humanism were situated as “a philosophy of new social strata”, which led to the recreation of political science.[xxiii] Scholastic theorists had subordinated politics to religion, seeking to establish the foundations of the best order for a Christian world based on the Gospels.
The humanists, on the other hand, began to seek the means to build the ideal city of philosophers. Francesco Guiccciardini was simultaneously a historian (the greatest in Renaissance Italy) and a statesman. Niccolò Machiavelli managed to combine his political and diplomatic experience with broad reflection (an “uninterrupted reading”) on the past: The prince was the result of these readings and this reflection. A new realism, “materialist”, but not yet democratic, burst onto the scene of ideas.
The elitist (and elitist) aspect of Renaissance humanism was observed by Antonio Gramsci: “One of the greatest weaknesses of immanentist philosophies consists precisely in not having been able to create an ideological unity between the low and the high, between the 'simple' and the intellectuals. In the history of Western civilization this fact was verified on a European scale, with the failure of the Renaissance, and even of the [Protestant] Reformation, in confrontation with the Roman Church”.[xxv] Before “failing,” however, the Renaissance revolutionized decisive sectors and areas of society. It had multiple roots, which went back to the beginning of the European commercial renaissance and the Crusades. The latter, conceived as a military enterprise in defense and expansion of the Christian world, contributed to undermining the foundations of that world, calling into question the provincialism of the old lordly order: “The Western world, until then cloistered, found itself reintegrated into the Mediterranean area, once again passable and a link uniting all its coasts. The Byzantine and Muslim worlds began to exert intense influence on the sphere of [Roman] Christianity, which found a favorable reception by converging with certain dormant but not destroyed directions of the spirit. In real life, the most significant fact was the renewal of economic life and the accelerated rise of the bourgeoisie. The cities grew and prospered… The old ideals, heroism and holiness, began to be replaced by others: work and wealth, through which power was also attained (while) the idea of the viability of an ecumenical order declined sharply. For more than two centuries the two powers that embodied it, the Empire and the papacy, had fought for preeminence; at the beginning of the Late Middle Ages the spectacle was desolate in both.”[xxiv]
Two centuries and nine Crusades passed: François Guizot noted that “at the end of the 13th century, none of the causes of the Crusades had survived. Man and society had changed so much that neither the moral impulse nor the social necessity that had precipitated Europe into Asia were felt”. Between the first and the last Crusades there had been “an immense interval that revealed a true revolution in the state of mind… This was the main effect of the Crusades: a great step towards the emancipation of the spirit, a progress towards broader and freer ideas”. At the beginning of the Christian invasion of the Arab East, the Muslims saw the Crusaders “as barbarians, the most warlike, most ferocious and most stupid men they had ever seen. The Crusaders, for their part, were impressed by the wealth and elegance of the Muslims’ customs. This impression was followed by frequent relations between the two peoples”.[xxv]
These relationships would have a strong influence on the cultural changes that followed – adding to the influence that wisdom and translations of the classics from the Eastern Orient already had on Christian monasteries – when a struggle was waged in Europe to leave behind the “medieval darkness”. A struggle that had “Eastern” roots, although it ended by consecrating the West as the sole bearer of humanism, freedom and modernity.
Summing up widespread judgments in the 19th century, for Friedrich Engels the Renaissance was “the greatest progressive revolution that humanity has so far experienced… (it) summoned giants and produced giants in power of thought, passion and character, in universality and learning”. Thus, “the men who founded the modern rule of the bourgeoisie had anything but bourgeois limitations”.[xxviii] This is proven by the fact that these men also opened up a new field of ideas and struggles towards an egalitarian society. The dynamic contradiction of the new historical era was present at its very origin, when “the two great utopias of the sixteenth century, those of Thomas More and [Tommaso] Campanella [the city of the sun], who really founded modern socialism, insofar as at the basis of their world view was a profound critique of the society of their time, especially the consequences of the rise of capitalism for the disinherited classes.”[xxviii]
Communist theories date back to the 16th century, symbolized in the Utopia by Thomas Morus (1516), who became chancellor of Henry VII's England, in which he argued that “unless private property is completely abolished, it is not possible to have a fair distribution of goods nor can humanity be adequately governed. If private property remains, the great and best part of humanity will continue to be oppressed by a heavy and inevitable burden of anguish and suffering.”[xxix]
Francis Bacon, in the novel The New Atlantis, described an ideal society governed by science and solidarity, and James Harrington criticized, in Oceana, the unequal distribution of property and goods; Tommaso Campanella, in The City of the Sun defended radical communitarianism. All these imaginary utopias were located in distant parts of a world that was still largely unknown.
They also anticipated modern social criticism, with “its positive proposals regarding future society, the suppression of the distinction between city and country, the abolition of the family, private profit and waged work, the proclamation of social harmony and the transformation of the State into a simple administration of production and the disappearance of the antagonism between classes, which these authors knew inaccurately... These proposals had a purely utopian feeling”.[xxx]
These were anticipations that still lacked the material basis for their realization, but they opened the way for thinking about a future based on the collective ownership of the means of production. The connection and contradictions between the ideas that emerged in Europe in the 13th century and the political and social rise of the bourgeoisie were not, however, the main concern of most historians. The men of the Renaissance not only had no bourgeois limitations; they also had no limitations from the past that they invoked, intending to revive and revivify it, when in fact they were creating something new, although “their society and mode of production were not yet the bourgeois society and mode of production (and) were far from becoming the conscious ideology of the entire bourgeoisie.”[xxxii]
4.
The Renaissance broke out in a period in which the conditions of production remained basically unchanged, “between feudalism and what would subsequently develop, a state of equilibrium between feudal and bourgeois forces”.[xxxi] There was already a tendency to accumulate money instead of squandering and accumulating use values: “The accumulated capital was reinvested to obtain profits, with a mentality of economic profit, not of expenditure, as was the case of the nobility in previous times… Renaissance society was divided into estates slightly different from medieval ones, made up of closed groups, between which transfers were difficult”.[xxxii]
The Italian Medici and the German Welsers and Fuggers accumulated and traded money to the point of having great influence on continental politics. Money was beginning to become the true basis of political power and favored a new type of social advancement. The Renaissance period has been defined as “a powerful revolution in the conditions of the economic life of society (which) was not followed, however, by any immediate corresponding change in its political structure. The political order remained feudal, while society became increasingly bourgeois.”[xxxv]
This altered the relations between thought and economic/social existence, because with “the emergence of bourgeois cycles of accumulation, a constant interaction arose between the needs created by the development of the means of production and the evolution of science… scientific problems reached such a degree of abstraction and such a technical character that they became beyond the understanding and capacity of everyday human thought”.[xxxiv]
A way of thinking still dominated by faith and religion, which at the end of the 1250th century sharpened its instruments of domination, creating the Holy Office of the Inquisition to combat “heretical” Christian movements, such as the Cathars and Waldensians. From the XNUMXs onwards, inquisitors began to be chosen from among the members of the Dominican Order, replacing the practice of using local clergy as judges of inquisitorial courts, which would last until the mid-XNUMXth century.
During the Renaissance, the concept and scope of the Inquisition were significantly expanded in response to the Protestant Reformation and in correlation with the Catholic Counter-Reformation. The Renaissance revolution coexisted with its militant denial; Vassili Grossman thus proposed a correlation between both phenomena: “When the Renaissance burst into the desert of medieval Catholicism, the world of darkness was illuminated by the fires of the Inquisition. Its flames illuminated the power of evil and the spectacle of destruction.”[xxxiv]
The Inquisition was the response of the Catholic/feudal complex to the growing threats against its very existence. Czech historian Josef Macek defined the loci historical context of the Renaissance in the context of the crisis of feudalism, in the “general development of commodity production, the emergence of capitalist relations of production, the accelerated accumulation of usurious and mercantile capital, the abolition of serfdom, popular victories in the republics, the disintegration of the Church and the decline of papal power, the powerful popular revolts in the cities and in the countryside (which) characterized the first crisis of feudalism”.[xxxviii]
The 13th century would have been the period of maximum development of the feudal mode of production, with Frederick II,[xxxviii] brought to its crisis by the Mongol invasions, with the 14th century already dominated by the crisis of feudalism. In the wake of this, the end of the Middle Ages witnessed, in the Church, the “dispute of universals”,[xxxix] evidence of a transitional situation that saw the emergence of the Franciscan order (“anti-papal Franciscanism, the spearhead of Platonism towards the Renaissance”), the work of John Duns Scotus and the crisis of the dominant ideology, with William of Ockham (1285-1347) carrying out his complete critique.
The Franciscan friar, known as Doctor Invincibilis, proposed the separation of Church and State, defending a secular absolutism that respected property rights. The popes would have no right or reason to treat the secular government as their property: the government should be solely earthly, and could even accuse the Pope of crimes. Ockham was also a philosopher: his ternary logical system, with three truth values, would be taken up again in the mathematical logic of the 19th and 20th centuries. Politically, he defended the thesis that the authority of the religious leader was limited by natural law and by the freedom of those he led, as affirmed in the Gospels, stating that a Christian would not contradict the evangelical teachings by siding with the temporal power in a dispute against the papal power.[xl]
“Ockham’s razor” was transformed into a universal logical principle, stating that the best solution to a problem would be the one that presents the least possible number of premises. A “philosophical” razor should be used to eliminate unlikely options: the principle postulates that from multiple adequate and possible explanations for the same set of facts, one should choose the simplest one, the one that contains the fewest possible variables and hypotheses with logical relationships between them: “All other things being equal, the simplest explanation is generally the most probable”. The rule is associated with the requirement to recognize, for each object analyzed, only one sufficient explanation. Ockham has been called a “hinge thinker”, a “transitional philosopher”, the last scholastic and the first modern,[xi] active in an era in which questions about religious authority multiplied, to the point of calling into question the value or reality of the divine presence in worldly life; Étienne Gilson came to define the Renaissance as “the Middle Ages without God”.[xliii]
The “Renaissance revolution” took place within a long transition, with limits both within and beyond its context, to the point that Jean Delumeau questioned its conceptual validity: “Our understanding of the period from Philip the Fair to Henry IV would be greatly facilitated if two terms that are both inexact and mutually inexact were removed from history books: ‘Middle Ages’ and ‘Renaissance’. This would abandon a whole set of prejudices. We would be free of the idea that there had been a sudden break that separated an era of light from a period of darkness. Created by the humanists and taken up again by Vasari, the notion of a resurrection of literature and the arts thanks to the re-encounter with Antiquity was as fruitful as all the manifestos launched in every century by new generations of conquerors”.[xiii]
For French historians, the very notion of the Renaissance was a product of Italian nationalism and even “racism” (sic), of which they were victims: “Division of human history into three eras, the second being an age of darkness and barbarism, conception of a Renaissance of Latin letters and Antiquity, Italian hegemony in matters of the spirit, these are three fundamental parts of the concept of the Renaissance, which later imposed themselves on Europe and historians, victims of a gigantic myth.”[xiv] Certainly illustrious victims, such as Jules Michelet (1798-1874), or Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897), whose works were decisive in consolidating the notion of Renaissance in historiography.
5.
Jacob Burckhardt emphasized that the Renaissance was not, in its content, a resurrection of Antiquity, despite representing itself as such:[xlv] “The Renaissance concealed its profound originality and its desire for novelty behind a misleading hieroglyph: the false image of a return to the past… Thanks to their contact with the ancient heritage, humanists acquired two fundamental convictions: that their activity could only be truly exercised at the price of a rigorous and entirely renewed knowledge of the ancients; and that the humanity of the ancients was valid in itself, despite the characteristics that differentiated it from Christian ideals.”[xlv]
As for its extension, Jacob Burckhardt advocated for “a vast landscape that stretches from the end of the 13th century to the dawn of the 17th century, and that goes from Brittany to Muscovy”. The impact of Renaissance humanism was different. In the Iberian countries, “the enthusiasm for the discovery and conquest of the Indies gave rise to the valorization of the moderns imposing itself on that of classical antiquity, profoundly transforming the aspect of Renaissance humanism”.[xlv]
In Portugal, the discoveries brought a wealth of information and notions of the most varied order. Through these sources, “especially in those who saw or experienced them in action or thought, an intellectual, intuitive and practical awareness emerged, which often affected theoretical culture”.[xlviii]
In Italy, where commercial and industrial development was stunted, by contrast, there was a “refeudalization” that gave power to a new type of nobility, the “merchant aristocracy.” Nicholas of Cusa realized the danger that “Ockhamism” (of Ockham) represented for Christian theology. Although considered one of the greatest mathematicians of his time, he opposed the learned ignorance, erudite knowledge far from God: “De Cusa examines the various sciences to conclude that none arrives at the perfect formulation of truth. Science, even mathematics, is the domain of the approximate, of the relative… The creature brings together in itself two irreconcilable things: its origin in the absolute and its imperfection. The creature is neither God nor nothingness. It finds itself as if between God and nothingness. It cannot be said that it exists, because of itself it does not exist, nor that it does not exist. The conclusion is that its being is unintelligible. Our intelligence cannot overcome this contradiction.”[xlix] De Cusa tried to reconcile the advancement of new ideas with the theology of institutionalized religion, supreme and based on Revelation and na[UX1] Faith, although he advocated the independence of scientific knowledge. In controversy with his attempt to articulate the humanist ideal with religion, Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), the martyr of the Renaissance (Bruno was a victim of the Inquisition Court) defended an ideal of humanity “that contained within itself the ideal of autonomy, and the more the latter was strengthened the more the terrain of the religious circle was undermined”.
For Ernst Cassirer, the terms of the controversy between Nicholas of Cusa and Giordano Bruno summarized “the entire movement of ideas of the 15th and 16th centuries (with) the progressive transformation of the problem of freedom and the increasingly secure and vigorous advance of the principle of freedom within the religious ideology of the Renaissance”.[l] A fight for freedom that Giordano paid for with his own life.
There are a number of reasons in favor of the idea of a “Renaissance revolution.” A doctor from Chartres wrote: “Authority has a wax nose that can move in every direction; it must be guided by reason.”[li] Not only was it necessary to challenge authority, it was also possible. Jack Goody, including other civilizations in this general panorama, warned of the spatial variety (not only European) “of the Renaissances”.
The same could be done regarding its temporality, which recognized two moments: “A first Renaissance is linked to the 14th and 15th centuries; the influence of Neoplatonism elevates man to the creature with the greatest power of intervention in the world… a radical moment when we speak of freedom and autonomy (which) develops an individualism that makes him possessor of desires, wishes and interests”. The new city would be the great work and the great place of this phase.
The second phase, “that of the sixteenth century, is almost the opposite. Freedom and autonomy leave the individual sphere and are absorbed by the State; it is the State and no longer the city that begins to give meaning to men, who now no longer know themselves or even live the experiences of men in the world. Free experimentation is repressed as exaggeration and disorder.”[liiii] Eugenio Garin also used the plural to refer to “renaissances”: “Not comparable with the notion of ‘scientific revolution’, the Renaissance was an ideal and a program that achieved a profound renewal in the name of a return to the past. Throughout the centuries in which the myth operated, it did not remain the same.”[iii] Eugênio Garin referred to the European clash with Eastern (especially Chinese) and American civilizations as a decisive factor in rethinking the experience of humanity during that period.
The contradictions of the Renaissance expressed new economic and social realities. Europe was in crisis. There was a strong demographic increase with a stagnant supply of land for cultivation, which caused economic crises, revolts and social upheavals: feudal society began to shake at its foundations.
The exploration of new human habitats gave partial vent to these upheavals: “The Renaissance has been aptly characterized as the ‘Age of Reconnaissance,’ for behind the revival of interest in classical culture lay the outpouring of energy in western Europe that came from the creation of new technologies and new forms of organization. Improvements in ship design and navigation, together with the application of men and capital, enabled Europe to explore the depths of the oceans and to reach the coasts of most of the inhabited lands of the globe.”[book]
In his style, which is not very fond of historical subtleties, Eduardo Galeano wrote: “Our region of the world, which we now call Latin America, has specialized in losing since the remote times when the Europeans of the Renaissance rushed across the sea and sank their teeth into its throat.”[lv] The abrupt tone of the sentence reveals an unavoidable reality.
In Prabir Purkayastha’s summary: “The conventional history of the West – written by the West – is the development of science and technology, the product of the European Enlightenment, which revived in Western Europe after having lain dormant for a thousand years. This was the Renaissance, and Enlightenment was its product. The Enlightenment led to scientific thought, which in turn led to the industrial revolution and the pre-eminence of Europe. In this context, European dominance was merely the consequence of a mental revolution, and its roots go back to classical Greece, which was reborn after a thousand years. It does not matter that Greece and Western Europe are geographically at the two ends of the continent and have very little in common. Serious historians accept that the Dark Ages in Europe did not affect the other continents, which did not see this decline. Asia continued to develop knowledge and production, both in agriculture and in manufacturing. The centers of learning were located in Western Asia, referred to by the West as the Middle East, and in Turkey, again referred to as the Near East, as well as in Central Asia, India and China, which were not disturbed by the so-called Dark Ages in Europe.”[lv]
6.
The controversy extends to the theory of history. What in Eduardo Galeano was nothing more than a literary-image resource, in a popular anti-imperialist and anti-colonial essay, was transformed into theory by the authors of the so-called “decoloniality”, who even claim that the new European forms of thought and expression were at the heart of the colonization of the New World; the Amerindians were at a disadvantage when facing the European invaders because the native cultures did not employ the same type of “texts” (communication) as the Europeans.
The Renaissance of the 15th and 16th centuries had a forgotten and invisible side: the colonization of the Americas and the destruction of local cultures.[lviii] For the most radical version, the “universals” of thought simply do not exist; they would be, when exposed, only an instrument of cultural domination, which would pose a problem not for any “culture” but for the entire human race. Several authors have criticized the idea that European colonialism and the destruction of colonial peoples and societies were a “confrontation of discourses” or a clash of cultures.
Neil Larsen described this theory as unfounded and “reactionary” (“One cannot think, theorize or criticize without the category of the universal”), based, like postmodernism, on a change of prefixes (“de”, “post”, etc.) for already existing concepts, and on the lack of methodologically or scientifically valid content.[lviii] In the Renaissance period, the universals of thought were reformulated through a tortuous path within the convulsive historical process that shaped the modern world.
*Osvaldo Coggiola He is a professor at the Department of History at USP. Author, among other books, of Marxist economic theory: an introduction (boitempo). [https://amzn.to/3tkGFRo]
Notes
[I] Perry Anderson has questioned the “charge – if not the term – of ‘presentism’, as the abstraction of past ideas from their historical context in order to misuse them in the present”, opposing it to the work of those who had “no difficulty in establishing direct – and antithetical – connections between the Enlightenment’s concepts of the public sphere and the burning concerns of the contemporary world: the dangers of totalitarianism, the culture of commodified media and delegative democracy”: “The meaning of a political idea can only be understood in its historical context – social, intellectual, linguistic. To remove it from that context is an anachronism. Nevertheless… meaning and use are not the same. Ideas from the past can acquire contemporary relevance – even, on occasion, greater than they originally had – without being misinterpreted” (Perry Anderson. Cambridge School – against presentism. the earth is round. Sao Paulo, October 30, 2024).
[ii] Pierre Fougeyrollas. The Nation. Essor et decline of modern societies. Paris, Fayard, 1987.
[iii] See for example: Marcel Gauchet. The Modern Revolution. Paris, Gallimard, 2007.
[iv] Peter Laslett. The World We Lost. Lisbon, Cosmos, 1975.
[v] Matthias Becher. Otto der Grosse: Kaiser und Reich. Munich, CH Beck, 2012.
[vi] Gaetano Mosca and Gaston Bothoul. History of Political Doctrines. Rio de Janeiro, Zahar, 1975.
[vii] Philippe Wolff. L'Éveil Intellectuel de l'Europe. Paris, Threshold, 1971.
[viii] Ideology is not circumstantial or local, but universal: human beings live governed by social and ideological relations; there is no social relationship that is not also ideological. Ideology allows for an imaginary relationship that gives coherence to relationships with the material world and with other individuals. There is no human practice that is not based, in Althusser's words, on “a system of ideas represented in words, which constitute the ideology of that practice.”
[ix] Abelard's main work, the Dialectic, was the most influential work on logic in Christianity until the end of the 13th century. In the Vatican, it was used as a school manual. For Abelard, dialectics (a dialogue composed of contradictions) was the only path to truth, dispelling prejudices and encouraging free thought: nothing, except the Scriptures, was infallible, not even the apostles and the priests. Abelard identified the real with the particular, and considered the universal as the meaning of words, rejecting nominalism; the meaning of names would allow concepts to be clarified, in order to emancipate logic from metaphysics (Miguel Spinelli. The discursive dialetics of Peter Abelard. Veritas, Porto Alegre, vol. 49, no. 3, 2004).
[X] Claude Delmas. History of European Civilization. Barcelona, Oikos-Tau, 1970.
[xi] To keep the University under control, the Church reserved the right to grant permission to teach there, also establishing salaries for teachers, who became ecclesiastical or princely officials.
[xii] Christophe Charle and Jacques Verger. History of Universities. New York, 1996.
[xiii] Jacques Le Goff. Los Intelectuales en la Edad Media. Buenos Aires, Eudeba, 1965.
[xiv] Jean Gimpel. The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages. Rio de Janeiro, Zahar, 1977.
[xv] Augustine of Hippo (354–430) codified the outlines of medieval Christianity after his conversion and baptism. Based on the premise that the grace of Christ was indispensable for human freedom, he helped formulate the doctrine of original sin. As the Western Roman Empire began to crumble, Augustine developed the concept of the Catholic Church as a spiritual “City of God” distinct from the earthly, material city and closely linked to the sector of the Church that adhered to the concept of the Trinity as postulated by the Councils of Nicaea and Constantinople. In the Catholic Church, Augustine came to be venerated as a saint and a prominent Doctor of the Church.
[xvi] Nicolas de Oresme, a cleric and scientist, was an economist, philosopher, mathematician, physicist, astronomer, biologist, psychologist, musicologist, theologian and translator, Bishop of Lisieux and advisor to King Charles V of France. One of the most original thinkers of medieval Europe, he is considered one of the founders of modern science.
[xvii] John Fred Bell. History of Economic Thought. Rio de Janeiro, Zahar, 1982.
[xviii] Marsilius of Padua. The Defender of Peace. Madrid, Tecnos, 1989 [1324].
[xx] Felice Battaglia. Marsilio da Padova and the Political Philosophy of the Middle Ages. Bologna, CLUEB, 1987.
[xx] Nicola Matteucci. Liberalism. In: Norberto Bobbio, Nicola Matteucci and Gianfranco Pasquino. Politics Dictionary. Brasilia, UnB Publishing, 1986.
[xxx] Franco Lombardi. Birth of the Modern World. Paris, Flammarion, 1958.
[xxiii] Ernst Cassirer. Individual and Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy. New York, New York, 2001.
[xxiii] Giancarlo Zanier. Umanesimo and 'Rinascimento': a philosophy of new social ideas. In: Nicolao Merker. History of Philosophy. L'epoca dela borghesia. Rome, Riuniti, 1984.
[xxv] Antony Gramsci. Quaderni del Jail. Turin, Einaudi, 1975 [1929-1935].
[xxiv] Jose Luis Romero. the middle ages. Mexico, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1987 [1949].
[xxv] Francois Guizot. History of Civilization in Europe. Since the fall of the Roman Empire there has been the French Revolution. Madrid, Alianza, 1968 [1828].
[xxviii] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. On Literature and Art. Moscow, Progress Publishers. 1976.
[xxviii] Jacques Droz. History of Socialism. Vol. 1, cit. Droz traced the origins of socialism back to the great utopians of the sixteenth century, while in traditional approaches these origins include three later strands: the heirs of the French Revolution – egalitarians, utopians, Saint-Simonians, Blanquists, anarchists; the English economists, critics of the Industrial Revolution – Ricardians and Owenites; and finally the German philosophers, until reaching Marx's synthesis (cf. George Lichtheim. Los Origins of Socialism. Barcelona, Anagrama, 1975, considered by Eric J. Hobsbawm the best book on the subject).
[xxix] Thomas Moore. Utopia. Brasília, University of Brasília, 2004 [1516].
[xxx] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Communist Manifesto. São Paulo, City of Man, 1980 [1848].
[xxxii] Agnes Heller. The Renaissance Man. Lisbon, Presence, 1982.
[xxxi] Paula Bandovintti Serpa. Renaissance: fierce dawn of modernity. History & Class Struggle No. 15, Cândido Rondon, March 2013.
[xxxii] Álvaro L. Franco, Miguel V. Carrasco and Gala Y. Narváez. The Renaissance. The spirit of a new era. Barcelona, Salvat, 2018.
[xxxv] Friedrich Engels. Anti-Duhring. São Paulo, Boitempo, 2015 [1878].
[xxxiv] Agnes Heller. The Renaissance Man, cit.
[xxxiv] Vassili Grossman. Life and Destiny. Barcelona, Debolsillo, 2007.
[xxxviii] Josef Macek. The Italian Renaissance. Rome, Riuniti, 1974 [1965].
[xxxviii] Holy Roman Emperor and King of Italy from 1220 until his death, as well as King of Sicily from 1198 and King of Jerusalem from 1225 to 1228, in right of his wife Queen Isabella II. He was the son of Emperor Henry VI and his wife Queen Constance of Sicily.
[xxxix] Scotus valued experience, rejecting philosophy's exclusive concern with universal and transcendent essences: men, as created beings, could not be certain about God's conceptual characteristics, but they could be certain that He exists. Universals such as "truth" and "goodness" existed in reality. William of Ockham and Peter Abelard, on the contrary, claimed that universals existed only within the mind, without having external or substantial reality: universal forms were merely mental constructions.
[xl] Nicolás López Calera. Guillermo de Ockham and the birth of modern secularism. Analysis of the Francisco Suárez Chair nº 46, University of Granada, 2012.
[xi] John Losee. A Historical Introduction to Philosophy of Science. London, Oxford University Press, 1977.
[xliii] Etienne Gilson. Philosophy in the Middle Ages. Sao Paulo, Martins Fontes, 1998.
[xiii] Jean Delumeau. La Civilization of the Renaissance. Paris, Arthaud, 1967.
[xiv] Roland Mousnier. The 16th and 17th Centuries. Sao Paulo, Difel, 1973.
[xlv] Jacob Burckhardt. Renaissance Culture in Italy. New York, New York: Routledge, 2009 [1860].
[xlv] José Luiz Ames. Poetics of Virtue. Science Time Vol. 8, No. 15, Toledo, CCHS / Unioeste, January-June 2001.
[xlv] José Antonio Maravall. Ancient and Modern. Vision of history and idea of progress towards the Renaissance. Madrid, Alianza, 1986.
[xlviii] José Sebastião da Silva Dias. The Discoveries and Cultural Problems of the 16th Century. Lisbon, Presence, 1982.
[xlix] Nicholas of Cusa. History Magazine, São Paulo, University of São Paulo, vol. II, no. 7, July-September 1951.
[l] Ernst Cassirer. Individual and Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy. São Paulo, Martins Fontes, 2001 [1927].
[li] Eustachio Paolo Lammana. History of Philosophy. Vol. 2: Thoughts on Early Media and Renaissance. Buenos Aires, Hachette, 1960.
[liiii] Francisco Falcon and Antonio E. Rodrigues. The Making of the Modern World. The construction of the West from the 2006th to the XNUMXth centuries. Rio de Janeiro, Campus-Elsevier, XNUMX.
[iii] Eugenio Garin. Rinascite and Revoluzioni. Bari, Laterza, 2007.
[book] Woodrow Borah. Renaissance Europe and the population of America. History Magazine, Sao Paulo, University of Sao Paulo, LIII (105), July-September 1976.
[lv] Eduardo Galeano. The Open Veins of Latin America. Porto Alegre, L&PM, 2010 [1971].
[lv] Prabir Purkayastha. The Bloody Rise of the West. the commoner No. 39, Lisbon, September 2024.
[lviii] Walter Mignolo. The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, & Colonization. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2003.
[lviii] Sarika Chandra and Neil Larsen. Postcolonialism: a historical introduction. Cultural Critique #62, Winter 2006, University of Minnesota Press; Neil Larsen and Ignacio Corona-Gutiérrez. Postmodernism and imperialism: theory and politics in Latin America. New Critical Text, Year III, No. 6, second semester of 1990, Stanford University Press.
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