Renaissance
July 7, 2009
An extract from A Return to the Spirit by Martin Lings (p. 14), containing a quote from Frithjof Schuon, a magnificent and prolific spiritual writer of the 20th century, on the European Renaissance period:
This transition from objectivism to subjectivism reflects and repeats in its own way the fall of Adam and the loss of Paradise; in losing a symbolist and contemplative perspective, founded both on impersonal intelligence and on the metaphysical transparency of things, man has gained the fallacious riches for the ego; the world of divine images has become a world of words. In all cases of this kind, heaven- or a heaven- is shut off from above us without our noticing the fact, and we discover in compensation an earth long unappreciated, or so it seems to us, a homeland which opens its arms to welcome its children and wants to make us forget all lost Paradises; it is the embrace of Maya, the siren’s song; Maya, instead of guiding us, imprisons us. The Renaissance thought that it had discovered man, whose pathetic convulsions it admired; from the point of view of laicism in all its forms, man as such had become, to all intents and purposes, good, and the earth too had become good and looked immensely rich and unexplored; instead of living only “by halves” one could at last live fully, be fully man and fully on earth; one was no longer a kind of half-angel, fallen and exiled; one had come a whole being, but by the downward path.”
Wow…this is deep. So I guess from this point of view…the Renaissance wasn’t a great intellectual revolution after all. Mankind became more self-absorbed. It makes sense too.
It was a revolution of the wrong type of intellect, unfortunately. The intellect that aspired to worldly perfection was elevated. Even the religious aspect of life had been gilded with a worldly veneer, and hence extravagance and opulence came to symbolize religion and its manifestations in Europe, a far cry from the abstinence and other-worldliness which Christ preached. And God knows best.