The rise of humanism and science in the age we call the Renaissance was in no way a disavowal of Plato and Aristotle. Indeed, the ancient world, the “classic” world was experienced anew, in a new light, a new attitude. Architecture not only encloses and defines spaces, it also manifests the cultural lens through which a society understands itself and the world. Gothic architecture speaks of interiority and verticality; it is spiritual, inspirational. The classic styles of the ancients brim with claiming the solidity of the world, the exterior presence, the horizontal; they are human affirmations of power and prestige. The Renaissance is the cultic and cultural turning from the gothic to the classic. The ancient scholars are mined not for visions of god and soul, but for a new understanding of man and the functions of the world, to find in their speculations the justification for man as the centre of the world, to discover man not as the image of god, not inspired man, but expansive man, man the micro-cosmos, the microcosm, man conjoined with and in nature as the creative principle divine. In this emprise stoicism again raised its head and allowed vice to be valued on its own ground, as something removed from the constraints of traditional religion. Epicureanism excommunicated and exenterated the idea of heaven in favour of celebrating pleasure in the here and now. The ancient efforts of scepticism and eclecticism were likewise revisited.
Nicholas of Cusa turned to the Neo-Platonist ideals and enunciated the closure of that system as a “coincidence of opposites”, allowing the transcendent and immanent aspects of the divine to be resolved in an eternal synthesis. Both Hegel and Marx will revisit this thesis in differing manner. Telesio reduced all human effort to the world, to the sensible, the material, and thereby declared philosophy and theology fable, and physics truth. Much of 20th century philosophy will rehearse this position in endless detail. The visionary Giordano Bruno unfortunately reduced all that is to a monistic immanence, an essentially pantheistic position that will be revisited by Spinoza. These scholars and their confreres foreshadow the efforts of “modern” philosophy; they stand precariously close to confessing either agnosticism or pantheism. The fact that most of them were circumspect enough to fall back upon the endorsement of the prescribed cult, upon some form of fideism, does not obnubilate their departure from the traditional enunciation of orthodoxy.
Every rise of secularism inevitably arouses an atavistic religious fundamentalism, and early in the sixteenth century it arrived with frenetic fervour. Many understand the Reformation as an attempt to purge the cult of dogmatic irregularities and superstitions, to ablute the organization of scandal. In many ways this is accurate, but it does not capture the fuller picture. Underlying the various currents of the Reformation was a very real, conservative push back against the encroachments of the secular. In this sense, the Reformation is as much about culture as cult. The Renaissance reverenced not only the classical Latin of the ancient scholars but also their ideas and ideals, their pagan ideas and ideals. The brutal pragmatics of Machiavelli did not appear out of a void. The fascinations with ancient deities did not come without equal fascinations with their frolicsome or fearsome ways. Paintings of Venus do not supplant paintings of the Virgin without some root in the heart of the culture. The world was turning back to something other than the Gothic consecration of the rites of Christ. Not unrealistically to some, the world was going to hell, and the intelligentsia and potentates charged with the cult where the vanguard. Something, for Christ’s sake, needed be done.
Luther sought not only to redefine the internal structure of the church, but also of society, to bring Christian society out of the mediaeval world, past the Latinist secular tendencies of humanism and into a world reoriented to Christ, to a Christ always understood as present for-us, to a modern realignment of men, to a world almost democratic, a world enunciated neither in the Latin of the ancients nor of the mediaevals but in the language of the demos, a tongue both validated and consecrated in the publication of Bibel and Deutsche Messe.
Calvin sought to veer the world back to the faith in the all transcending and fearsome Holy One. The reformed church was not about the joy of man in the world, but about the duty of man in the world to God. It is, however, true that all work and no play makes for dull living. Yet, of all the visions proffered in the Reformation, Calvin’s attitude, the dull “let’s all dress in black”, woe-wailing fundamentalism held greatest sway. The artistry and fantasies of the mediaeval may have been abandoned, but Calvin, like Luther and Cranmer, did not forsake the piety of his heritage. Indeed, they all looked back to Augustine, and illuminism, and introspection. Small wonder, then, we own so little “reformed” art; there is little need for externalities in a world wherein the eye is always cast inward.
The Roman so-called Counter-reformation reactively exalted joy. Whereas early Protestantism fostered some of the most bleak architecture ever raised before the squalled sorrows of the industrialized post-imperial twentieth century, Roman Catholicism ran riot with every conceivable embellishment, gilding every sensation within its compass. Even the most heinous acts of martyrdom were made into bedizened ravishments at the portals of everlasting ecstasy.
In early Christian times and later in medieval times, religion, philosophy, science, and society ran concomitantly, functions of a common wave. The Renaissance and Reformation create something new, multiple waves. Philosophy and theology are no longer moored together. Religion and politics drift apart. Faith no longer controls morals, and God no longer rules the spheres. Curiosity trumps faith. Investigation tramples over speculation. Enterprise sinks obedience. There is a new rhythm to society. It is perhaps no less mean or brutal than the feudal; it is imperial in a way not seen since the earliest Caesars. Here, however, everyman might strive to take on the purple. The tides of the Renaissance may have loosened the hinges of society, but Luther broke them and set the demos free armed with the most potent of armours, the very word of God. He and his fellow reformers set out to contain the secular; they managed only to bless it. Thus, not only could everyman strive for the purple, but having seized it, he could anoint and proclaim himself. Priest and prophet become superfluous. Henceforth, the Lord Man reigneth!
An Excursus: I am well aware of the fact that I have often judged the reformed movement initiated by Calvin rather sternly. Calvin, pre-destined by his family for the priesthood, never advanced beyond the introductory rite of tonsure, a ritualistic cutting of the hair on the crown of the head to symbolize that one had moved away from the concerns of the world and was entering the realm of God’s work in the preparatory studies for ordination. Calvin chose to become a lawyer. There is no denial he was a religious man, a well-educated, and well informed man, that he underwent a sincere and very realizing conversion experience, and produced in his great religious work, “The Institutes”, a well-organized and enunciated catechetical guide. However, in properly discerning history, we must acknowledge the visions of the mind do not always translate without flaw to the heart and hands, of oneself or others.
I followed the debates of the Second Vatican Council, and was muchly enthused by the texts they produced. Roncalli had conjured an aggiornamento, an updating, and indeed, with much flourish and acclaim, a window was flung open, but there entered a tempest, blasting from their orbit things holy and profound, hurling them into a sea of banalities. The power of ritual, and the disciplines of prayer became endless and silly experiments in the hands of the hoi polloi and polyestered. In an irony that could only have occurred in the 1960s, here vision and praxis were torn asunder, and the trivial, trite, and “let’s try everything” attitude alone remained. A holy man’s vision to revitalize the sacred in the secular shipwrecked, and the psychedelic eclipsed the sacrosanct.[i] Such loss of trajectory is not confined to religion. I live in a city of countless restaurants. Some are rated fine, many good, most comfortable. Esteemed food emporiums are about as ubiquitous as gyms and spas. There is also on every corner, it seems, some “convenience” store stuffed with exceedingly well selling items bearing, as I am wont to call them, the four horsemen of the abdominous: sugar, fat, salt, and empty calories. I live in a portion of the world where every opportunity to eat and live healthily and well is served upon a silver platter, and I live in a portion of the world suffering from obesity. Somewhere between potential and practice, between accepted ideal and lived reality, things have fallen apart.
In Calvin’s world, somewhere between the sincerity of his faith and his pastoral concern, things fall apart, things become something other than envisioned. I postulate that the fault-line resides in his intense focus on the transcendence of the divine, a stress emanating from his early conversion experience of lowliness and sinfulness, coupled by his lawyerly mind-set wherein God and man are in a legal relationship, and the rule of law, the Rule of the Law-giver, trumps all else in the court of life.
Religion is in practical terms the discipline of worship, the obedience to or strict observance of that deemed the Holy. I have returned to “The Institutes” several times, and found the Holy there all high, almighty, and all just, but despite the incarnation, without an understanding of either time or humanity, without love for anything other than its own inscrutable justice, a God who is not Love, but Law, a Holy without joy. Joy is not a characteristic of the court of law. Joy is always personal. Neither institutes nor institutions are capable of being joyous, of being persons (except legally). As for the law, it is a serious business, life is not; it is something exceedingly more complex, and varied. To confine God to the seriousness of life defies the creativity, the artistry, the playfulness, the wonder and joy of Wholeness, of Holiness. Thus, I confess, I find Calvin sincere, but cold, clear but un-inspired and un-inspiring. I cannot quiz his intentions, but his efforts patently have led to religious conservatism, fundamentalism, and theocracy. They are a legalistic reaction to the libertine, dispensational attitude of the late mediaeval Roman church too evidenced in indulgences and the magical application of relic and ritual. On the positive side, for no thing is not capable of producing something good, first, his structural rule by elders, presbyters, is a direct demotion of the role of a supreme cleric, a supreme clerical power, which over time unfurls and evolves into a more inclusive ecclesiastical role for the laity, and therein engenders the attitudinal thrust toward social and political democracy in the West. Second, the enthronement of God in the highest of heavens, while enslaving the spirit in its sinfulness, caroms “duty bound” man toward a certain freedom regarding the practicalities of his endeavours, fostering, or at least not explicitly execrating, those efforts that have industrialized and commercialized the West. Third, in time, this sensitivity for democracy and for the secularity of enterprise, confronted by the loss of personhood and humanity the transcendent exclusivity of the divine excites, actually circumnavigates and eventually returns to a renewed understanding of the Holy and Gospel, a personalizing and humanitarian understanding, stimulating the rise of missions, the social gospel movements, the incarnational stress within the death of god theologies, and liberation theologies. Evolution can be circuitous, and the Holy is, by definition, the unstoppable, the without end. There is always hope.
Lastly, the reactionary thrusts and counter-thrusts in Western Christendom in the sixteenth century were not a novelty in the history of the species. They simply evidence the trauma inherent in the growth patterns, the growth horizons, we daily encounter in social interactions, in the development and maturation of our children, and of our sundry relationships, personal and institutional. Just as physical muscle must undergo some strain and pain to grow, develop, and healthily maintain itself, the same requisites are replicated in the building of psychic muscle, good health, strength, character, personality, personhood. The mandatory here is the exercise of reflection and readjustment, openness to analysis and synthesis, to dialogue and community. There is no innate psychic imperative for hostility, combativeness, or belligerence. We are, however, despite our rather high self-regard, a species more emotive than rational. We unthinkingly, instinctively, when wounded, sore, or challenged, tend to sulk, growl, and bite rather than sit down and figure things out, work things out. We are emotively more inclined to act the “top dog” than rationally build a community.
We have unleashed upon ourselves all manner of international difficulties by this declivity. Churches often fear where social gospel and liberation theologies will go. Will they topple the status quo, leaving a waste land of no law, no order, a culture overturned, and within it a cult imperilled? Would that nation states were so circumspect. In the last century the great western states imposed upon sundry peoples unaccustomed to definitive national boundaries or democratic governance both territorial bounds and constitutional ideals for which they had no preparation. These great states failed to reflect upon the fact that they grew into nation states over centuries of wars and battles among constantly realigning dukes, princes, kings, and emperors. They forget the efforts of Napoleon to bring equality, freedom and brotherhood to the kingdoms of Europe a mere two centuries ago was something rebuked as both tyrannical and heretical. They forget that while all share in one basal and equally free human nature, the cult and culture—in inextricable unity with their transmittal in language and art–form individuated and distinctive entities that must be approached and valued as such.[ii] They forget Europe was a blood bath for thirty years as the embryo of separation of church and state became implanted in the untenablity of theocracy or national church, and that that embryo is still, despite certain constitutional utterances and an aged secularism, yet gestating, and can probably never be properly born.[iii] They are mindless of the fact that democracy is still for us a creature in evolution, painfully and slowly moving onward from being merely the rights of the landed, to the rights also of the male, to the rights of women (only lately counted as persons), to the rights of children, the rights of the (not so long ago sequestered) disabled of whatever manner to the full benefit of social integration, to the rights of minorities, be they of colour or sexual orientation. They think this sacred inalienable right of demos, of the equality of all to share in civil rule and benefit can be dropped like some dew from heaven upon peoples whose vivifying social structure is still the familial or tribal, and be received of them with joy, when it is in fact for most a chaotic and fearful disruption of the way things are, and to the minds of many, the way things have always been and so ought still to be. The so-called third world’s reaction against the West is, the equivocation of the phrase intended, a terrifying scream in the face of an assault upon a way of life, upon life. One cannot enter the home of another and tell him that henceforth the home shall be run in such and such manner. The power that does so may deludedly think it is offering the gift of freedom, or salvation, or some other grace, but what is immediately in its hand is destruction, the tearing away of the accustomed and established, and most animatingly, the denigration of the native in the light of, in the blind belief in the superiority of the imposed.
In this regard, we may consider the rise of fundamentalism and radicalism within Islam, the cult of so many cultures in the last century confronted by the christian-infused, humanistic, and secular West, as the sulk, growl and bite of a society not felicitous that some stranger has come bearing gifts of equality, democracy and nationality that are simply incomprehensible, things unrequested, things unknown, and so things doubly “foreign”. The cult informs the culture. Challenge one, and in some manner or degree you threaten or defalcate the other. To declare the values, the ideals, the ideas of nationhood, governance, and society of the West as a liberation to a devotedly hierarchical, patriarchal, tribal society of a differing cult is either hubris unbounded or simple insanity. Dialogue, not dictation, defines.
Two hundred years ago the United States invaded my nation, and a general decreed “People of Canada, we have come to liberate you!” A generation before we had purposefully chosen not to be part of the revolution to our south, and had no idea the peace, order, and good governance we enjoyed under the Crown was something from which we needed liberation. Not many years ago, another American general made the same declaration of freedom to another people on the other side of this planet. Admittedly, they were in a less than enviable political reality, but freedom is something one must seek, find, and treasure for oneself, be that individually or societally, it cannot be gifted, it cannot be imposed; it may be assisted in dia-logue, aided in midwifery. The tyrant may be vanquished, and the conquering hero may cry “you are free”, but the republic to my south, of all nations, ought to know, emancipation is a reality exposed not imposed, enjoyed not enjoined. Declarations do not create freedom, faith does—faith in oneself, in one’s own inestimable value, and in the like worth of each and all. That is patently why we have those masters of psychic dialogue and spiritual midwifery–prayer-guides, spiritual directors, psychologists, and psychiatrists. Nation states and churches would do better had they access to such. We would all be the better to emulate those Greeks of Plato’s dinner parties, recline upon our couches, and find the clarity of our ideas and ideals, rather than the passion and heat of our feelings, be they proud or hurt.
[i]Lest I be mistaken for a decrepit codger rattling the air with curse and cane, I ought to make some apologia pro. I have often decried the depauperation of dignity and decorum regarding the approach to and the handling of things holy resultant of the liturgical innovations unleashed with Vatican II, and as supported in my considerations on liturgy, justifiably. As is true of our physicality (in the sundry aspects of exercise, diet, work, play, socializing, etc.), I am adamantine that our spirituality, private and corporate, if it is to be healthful, must evidence governance, some organizing and animating discipline. However, the requisite of having logical and consistent formulae whereby to govern life’s interwoven aspects, to grow healthily and happily as one navigates the flux of the world, does not imply unbending rigidity; discipline is about having purpose and focus and balance—an inner triune creative core. Approaching things holy demands respect, not necessarily the formality of a white tie dinner party translated to the Lord’s table. Thus, while not unboundedly felicitous with all contemporary liturgical ventures, I do not believe all things liturgical have been in all places reduced to rubble, or that a liturgy that is informal is without merit. I recently was in attendance at a Roman church for a celebration of a “first Holy Communion” Eucharist. The music, produced by an assortment of instruments including tambourines and rattles played by the children, was lively, simple and good, the atmosphere exceedingly casual, and the liturgy, as a whole, akin to a Sunday school service. My intimates know the mere mention of liturgical dance usually renders me catatonic (undoubtedly because–in my experience–it has been the occasion for cacographic choreography featuring some leotard and chiffon clad entities leaping about like a mass of tasered bunny ectoplasm). At this liturgy, however, after the preparation of the gifts, the children did a ring dance around the holy table, and I found it as delightful and fitting as must have their parents. Adults were animated, and seemingly happy and comfortable to be part of it all. Children were ostensibly free to pop up and down, and out and about, without being either distraction or disturbance. It was worship with an undeniable sense of camaraderie and the dignity inherent in such esprit de corps, a sense of a community with purpose and good cheer. It had the flavour of a family luncheon in the garden, a come as you are and enjoy affair, and although I have no appetite for the attitude that must appeal to “what would Jesus do”, I am certain that Jesus, he of the thousands camped on a grassy hillside, would have been more at home here than in my preferred and fondly held, monastic-inspired, neo-gothic splendour of English Church anthems, Bach toccatas, and the cadence of Cranmer. My inclinations may be toward the formal, but regarding such I am neither automaton nor autocrat, and I must hope my writings on liturgy have made that pellucid. Religion, and Eucharist in particular, is essentially about celebrating, truly stopping to thankfully treasure our life, our life together and before and with God, in all its variety. Heliotropes that we are, despite ourselves and the foibles of our erudite few, somewhere within us—whether one name it by design, by nature, or by grace—we do turn to the light, we turn to find the light, to be able to bask, to smile, to say thank you, ευχαριστἐω [eucharist, I am thankful]. Neither formality nor informality guarantee growth or depth; openness, commitment [the discipline of focus], sincerity, and love do. We are Christian of a right form, orthodoxy, as long as when we “do this” we remember who we are, why we are who we are, by grace, holy children and heirs.
[ii] Cf: my on Ecumenism, 1 February 2012.
[iii] Cf: my on Theology and Religion, Cult and Culture, 24 June 2012.