After a month, I am now getting back to my “Ways of the Worldviews” series. We now come to the Renaissance.
All too often in most history books, the Renaissance is portrayed as a distinct time period that came after the so-called “Middle Ages”—a “renaissance” of classical culture and learning after the 1,000 year period of the “Catholic Dark Ages.” Once again, we must note that such a characterization is the product of the so-called Enlightenment, that sought to discredit Christianity, and in particular Catholicism, by purposely misrepresenting and lying about history.
To be clear, the Renaissance was not a “rebirth” of classical learning after a thousand years of Christian darkness. Rather than being a “rebirth” out of some fictional “dark ages,” the Renaissance was the maturing fruit that emerged from the soil of Byzantium and Catholicism. It was the culmination of the true Christian renaissance of the High Catholic Age, coupled with the influx of the philosophical and theological treasures of the Christian East, as Byzantine Christians came West as they fled from the advancing Islamic armies who were inflicting the death blows on the once proud Byzantine Empire.
Contrary to the modern false narrative of history, the “Renaissance” was not a “rebirth” of classical learning out from the “dark ages” of medieval Catholicism. It was, in fact, an expected maturing of a number of very crucial elements that grew out of the High Catholic Age—it was still very much part of that age. So what led to this “Renaissance”? A number of factors:
(1) the migration of Greek scholars from Constantinople after 1453 AD;
(2) the natural results of the influential thinkers of the High Catholic Ages, like Thomas Aquinas;
(3) the artistic and scientific freedom encouraged and supported by the Catholic Church; and
(4) let’s face it, the pure genius of men like Michelangelo and Da Vinci.
Now, the Italian Renaissance was truly a remarkable period that witnessed scientific, artistic, and literary advances. But it was the result of the Christian worldview, not its antithesis. With the wave of ancient and classical sources that came flooding into Europe in the hands of Eastern Christians, there became a renewed interest in, obviously, classical learning. The slogan of the Renaissance became “Ad fonts!” or “Back to the sources!” With that came a revival of interest in biblical languages and patristic studies. Simply put, the learning that had been preserved and yet largely confined to monastic orders, and later expanded to the universities, took another step forward and made its way to an even larger section of the population.
Humanism, of the Christian Variety
The effect of all this was a movement known as humanism—or more properly speaking, Christian Humanism. It was a recognition and appreciation for the goodness of not only the natural world, but also the dignity and worth of mankind. Such a view was not a reaction against the earlier influence of the Church; it was the fruit of it. This can be seen in the work of all the “big names” of the Renaissance.
Michelangelo (1475-1564) is best known for the magnificent sculpture of David, his La Pieta, and, of course, the Sistine Chapel. What do all these have in common? They are decidedly Christian-themed, while at the same time are celebrating human creativity and the beauty of the human form. Even in the Sistine Chapel, scattered among the painted scenes of various biblical stories, Michelangelo incorporated paintings of sibyls right next to the Old Testament prophets. He did this to illustrate, as Justin Martyr argued 1,300 years earlier, the notion that Christ was the fulfillment of not only Jewish hopes, but also brought salvation to the Gentiles.
Leonardo Da Vinci (1452-1519) is best known for the Mona Lisa, his painting of The Last Supper, the Vitruvian Man, his amazing sketches of the human anatomy, as well as his countless inventions.
Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543), a canon at the Catholic cathedral in Frauenburg, Prussia, was also an astronomer whose observations led to the abandonment of the old Ptolemaic, geocentric view of the universe (i.e. that the sun, moon, and stars revolve around a stationary earth), and the eventual acceptance of a heliocentric view of the universe (i.e. that the earth orbits around the sun).
His initial findings were later verified and advanced by the Italian mathematician, physicist, astronomer, and devout Catholic, Galileo Galilei (1564-1642). Using the new invention of the telescope, Galileo was able to not only verify Copernicus’ heliocentric model, but he also made numerous other contributions as well.
All this ingenious activity and discovery didn’t come about in opposition to the Church, but rather because of the Church. As imperfect (and often corrupt) as many Catholic Church leaders were at the time, they certainly did not try to quench learning, the arts, or the sciences. Rather, they wanted to be the ones known as being on the cutting edge of these new discoveries.
A Note on Copernicus
Incidentally, given the way we in the modern world have been conditioned to view history through the lens of (A) the golden age of Greece and Rome, (B) the “Dark Ages” of Christianity, and (C) the “Renaissance” and “Enlightenment” of secularism and reason, it is always necessary to correct some misconceptions. In this case, let’s briefly look at Copernicus.
Since Copernicus was so pivotal in developing our understanding of a heliocentric universe, the fact he was a canon in the Catholic Church obviously didn’t fit the so-called Enlightenment’s narrative that the Church was all about ignorance and the “dark ages.” And so, even though they couldn’t deny he was a good Catholic, they portrayed him as a kind of isolated genius who made this discovery, and that the Catholic Church tried to suppress his discovery.
Well, as Rodney Stark clearly shows in his book, The Triumph of Christianity, Copernicus’ discovery was not some sort of isolated shot in the dark that hit the mark. Rather, it was a discovery that was simply the next step in a long line of discoveries that had been going on for centuries. Here’s my summary of Stark’s points:
- Early Christians thought angels pushed the heavenly bodies.
- William of Ockham, an English Franciscan monk, (1295-1349) concluded that space is a frictionless vacuum.
- Nicole d’Oresme, the bishop of Lisieux (1325-1382), established that the earth turns on its axis, thus giving the illusion that the other heavenly bodies circle the earth.
- Nicholas of Cusa, the bishop of Brixen (1401-1464), said the earth is smaller than the sun but larger than the moon—it will always seem to the one standing that everything moves around him, so we need not trust our perceptions that the earth is stationary.
From that, Copernicus then put the sun in the middle of the solar system, with the earth going around it, along with the other planets, and voila…things made a lot more sense! Copernicus, though, didn’t yet realize that orbits are elliptical, not circular. Thus, as Stark tells us, “…everything in Copernicus’s famous book On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres is wrong, other than the placement of the sun in the center. It was nearly a century later that Johannes Kepler (1571-1639), a German Protestant, got things right by substituting ellipses for Copernicus’s circles” (280).
Stark further notes that from 1543, when Copernicus published his work, to 1680, there were essentially 52 “big names” in the realm of science at the time. Of those 52, 32 were very religious men, 19 were quite religious, and only one (Edmund Halley) could be called a skeptic.
That kind of puts a crimp in the style of the Enlightenment narrative that the Church was all about ignorance, and on a mission to suppress science and reason, doesn’t it?
Now, I can almost hear someone saying, “Ah, but what about Galileo?” Yes, what about him? That will be the topic of my next post.
