The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (Politically Incorrect Guides) (33 page)

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Authors: Anthony Esolen

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The first cause can be found in Pico’s narrative of the creation of Adam. The second can be found in what Pico has left out of that narrative. They are simply these. Once man accepts that he has no nature, he becomes unmoored from the rest of creation, radically alone, without any guard against committing the most unnatural of acts (as, for instance, inviting your kindly uncle and his friends to a dinner and killing them all to seize power; a naughty thing to do, says Machiavelli, but effective;
The Prince
, ch. 8). For Pico is wrong here, and the more staid philosophers of the Middle Ages were correct. Man does have a nature, glorious though it may be, and he must obey it. When he does not, he falls, sinning as Adam did. And that’s the second explanation for the slide from Pico to the amoral opportunist. Man sins.
 
The fall of man is a small incident in Genesis that Pico, in his
Oration
, overlooks. It’s a small step from claiming to transcend one’s created nature to believing that all things, even good and evil, are products of one’s almighty mind. So Satan wishes to persuade himself in hell:
 
The mind is its own place, and in itself
 
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n. (
Paradise Lost
, 1.254–55)
 
 
In fact this sobering revision of Renaissance confidence, verging upon Renaissance despair, Pico himself was to experience. It’s politically correct to smirk at that despair, to suppose that it was a reflex of the superstition of the Church, and to deny that we, who once again propose a vision of human “nature” infinitely malleable and therefore not a nature at all, will fall into the same abyss. We will; we must. Our premises are wrong.
 
For Pico saw the shame of man every day of his life. He lived in Medici Florence, a city whose bankers indulged themselves in pagan luxuries, while the poor workmen struggled against plague and famine. He had too sensitive a soul and he was too honest a man to miss it. In a letter to his nephew we hear nothing about the limitless possibilities of man, but of his frailty and wickedness: “For what can we really do without the help of God? And how shall he come to help us unless we call upon Him?”
6
Pico here recommends not the life of vast speculations, but obedience to the commandments of the Lord, revealed in Scripture and in the laws of our being:
 
 
 
Thomas More: The Real Renaissance Martyr for Truth
 
Galileo was not executed for speaking truth to power, but Sir Thomas More was. His last words, spoken from the gallows, were, “The king’s good servant but God’s first.”
 
 
What remains to say, but that many are Christians in name, few in reality? But you, my son, seek to enter by the narrow gate, and pay no heed to what the many do, rather to the duties shown you by the natural law, by reason, by God Himself.
 
 
Pico had heard the preaching of the Dominican firebrand, Girolamo Savonarola, and had been spellbound by his denunciation of the vanity of the rich Florentines, and their hardhearted crushing of the people’s liberty. The freewheeling Lorenzo de’ Medici, strongman of Florence, facing a rebellious populace and the weariness of scandal, took Pico’s advice and invited Savonarola to come to Florence and preach against the life he, Lorenzo, practiced. But Lorenzo soon regretted it, as Savonarola was a potent and dangerous speaker. When Savonarola decried the pagan ostentation of wealth, and the pagan spirit breathing in some of the art that graced the great halls, it was not only the dyers and fullers that heard, but the artists and poets too. Into a huge “bonfire of the vanities,” built in the wide Piazza della Signoria, repentant worldlings cast their trinkets and baubles. A young painter named Botticelli cast a few of his paintings, too. Judge him not too harshly. It’s easy for us to think we would like to live in a city animated by the heady spirit of paganism—so long as we are rich and well-connected. That city, Florence or Detroit, looks different from below.
 
By the flaring light of that bonfire we glimpse the other side of this Renaissance confidence in man. It is an honest look at man’s shame, and a blunt confession that man cannot save himself. Shakespeare is seldom more eloquent than when he peers into what happens when man violates his creaturely nature. Albany inveighs against the unnatural acts of King Lear’s daughters, who have exposed the old man to a pitiless storm, saying that if the heavens do not quickly curb such deeds,
 
Humanity must perforce prey on itself
 
Like monsters of the deep. (
King Lear
, IV.ii.48–49)
 
 
Lady Macbeth, urging her husband to the murder of his king and benefactor, would for the sake of ambition violate a woman’s holiest and most natural bond:
 
I have given suck, and know
 
How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me:
 
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
 
Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums,
 
And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn as you
 
Have done to this. (
Macbeth
, I.vii.54–59)
 
 
Lear’s daughters will die: Goneril will poison Regan, and will then take her own life. And Lady Macbeth, for all her bald materialist assumptions about good and evil—“A little water clears us of this deed” (II.ii.66), she says, wiping her distraught husband’s hands after the murder—will be plagued with sleeplessness and guilt, beyond the cure of herb or potion. Says the doctor who witnesses her sleepwalking:
Unnatural deeds
 
Do breed unnatural troubles. Infected minds
 
To their deaf pillows will discharge their secrets.
 
More needs she the divine than the physician.
 
God, God forgive us all! (V.i.75–79)
 
 
 
The Renaissance was bolder than our age in asserting man’s beauty and nobility, his capacity to reason of things divine. But it was bolder too in acknowledging our depravity, in confessing the paltry return we render unto God for His gifts. Here is that Renaissance courtier, Hamlet, who knows that Denmark is rotten and that a “king of shreds and patches,” his uncle Claudius, has murdered his brother to steal his crown and his queen:
 
What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god: the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals; and yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust? (
Hamlet
, II.ii.310–17)
 
 
Or young Miranda, raised on an uncharted island, seeing something utterly new to her—a young man:
 
I might call him
 
A thing divine; for nothing natural
 
I ever saw so noble. (
The Tempest
, I.ii.417–19)
 
 
She is right about that young man, as it turns out, but she has had no experience of human evil. All at once, at the end of the play, a curtain is drawn and she sees a roomful of people. Three of them tried to murder her long ago. Two of those three have been plotting another murder only a few hours since. Unaware of that sin, Miranda sees only the glory:
O wonder!
 
How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world That has such people in’t! (V.i.181–4)
 
 
 
We would not say so. But Miranda is correct. Mankind is beauteous, or is meant to be. Her father’s rejoinder does not contradict her. It is the voice of disappointment, coming to terms with sinful man as he is: “’Tis new to thee.” (V.i.184)
 
The age that gave birth to Pico gave birth also to John Calvin. Both were Renaissance humanists, students of the philosophers, poets, and theologians of antiquity. Neither one could we now endure: Pico, because he exalts man so highly; Calvin, because he accuses man of depravity; both, because they yearn for that vision of God which our schools deride. If we want man in all his glory, we can hardly do better than Michelangelo’s magnificent
David
, so naturally nude that it is impossible to imagine him clothed, with his non-classical glare of mingled trepidation, determination, and spiritual fire. Yet the same man who sculpted David, and the massive Adam of the Creation, and the nude Christ wielding his cross, painted himself in a most telling place. Look at his
Last Judgment
in the Sistine Chapel. All the saints tremble in awe before Christ the Judge. All bear some sign of their devotion or martyrdom. Bald Saint Bartholomew, who was flayed alive, holds the knife and a sagging skin, its face drooping in a grimace of weariness and pain. But, oddly enough, Bartholomew looks nothing like the skin he holds. That skinned face is of a heavy-jawed man with a broken nose and curly black hair. It is Michelangelo’s only self-portrait. “Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” cries Paul (Rom. 7:24), affirming the powerlessness of man, without God’s grace, not only to save himself but even to do the good he sees is good and avoid the evil he sees is evil. Michelangelo paints that cry.
 
 
The Bard Speaks: Moral Relativism
 
“There is nothing either good or bad,” Prince Hamlet says, “but thinking makes it so.” Hapless high school teachers hold this up as Hamlet’s philosophy: beauty, morality, and goodness are all social constructs. This reading utterly ignores the context within the play.
 
Hamlet is not articulating an enlightened idea; he is mocking his false friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. He acknowledges that, yes, there are people for whom there is no objective good or bad: those who don’t think.
 
 
 
Honoring the past
 
So the Renaissance was not simply an age of glorying in man. What about resurgent paganism? What caused the tremendous and fruitful interest in pagan antiquity?
 
First, the cause. Remember that the scholars of the Middle Ages had long been curious about pagan philosophy and history. They were hindered by practical problems. They didn’t possess the texts they needed. They didn’t even know where they were, or if they still existed. Teachers of Greek were rare. But the scholars did what they could. Thomas Aquinas hired a Greek to provide him with a more accurate translation of Aristotle than the one he had been using, which had been translated into Latin from Arabic. The medieval writers are forever citing Virgil, Ovid, what Cicero they knew, what Plato they knew, Livy, Seneca, and so forth, and when they don’t have the original text or a translation, they find out about it from discussions in ancient historians or critics. So Dante knows something about Homer, though he cannot have read Homer.
 
The Europeans were already searching for wisdom from the pagan past. They had the motive, and suddenly they were to have the means and opportunity. That’s because the Byzantine Empire was fighting a last losing battle against the onslaught of the Turks. Long before the fall of Constantinople in 1453, scholars and artists looked west for a haven, and scholars bring texts, the tools of their trade. In 1342, the Italian scholar and poet Francis Petrarch invited one Manuel Chrysoloras, an émigré from the East, to teach him ancient Greek. Chrysoloras was the first and the most famous of many men who crossed the seas into Italy, bringing with them their knowledge and their books. The trickle widened into a torrent. Scholars no longer had to rely on translations. Nor were they limited to the works known in the universities. They began to search the dusty corners of monasteries and ruins and manor houses. Every year or two brought another spectacular find, like newly discovered planets in the solar system.

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