The World Needs a Renaissance, Not an Enlightenment

By Adam Sedia

Originally appeared in New Lyre

Calling someone “enlightened” is considered a compliment: they see clearly, as opposed to groping blindly in the darkness. With this same connotation the “Enlightenment” of the eighteenth century is viewed as a positive development: an age when science triumphed over superstition and Europe emerged from the darkness of religious dogma. At least that is the narrative. 

“Renaissance” is a more neutral term, signifying rebirth. Something old is new again. It lacks any notion of progress, of light shining through the darkness, enabling forward vision. Indeed, it implies something of a throwback, a return to something earlier and therefore more primitive. 

These connotations require serious reexamination. Comparing the Renaissance of the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries with the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century reveals how wrong the connotations are, and how an “Enlightenment,” at least as conceived in the eighteenth century, is a dream that produces monsters. And “Renaissance” for its part is not just rebirth, but the preservation of what is beautiful and truthful in the old to forge something new. 

This is a crucial feature of the Renaissance, and what made it such a transformative period in Western Civilization. The artists and scholars of the day were not strict “restorationists” attempting to relive Classical Greece and Rome exactly as they were, nor even “fusionists” seeking to graft one culture onto another. Instead, their aim was to rediscover the ideas and aesthetics that made Classical culture so attractive to them and apply them to their own society as it was. In this paradigm, “old” and “new” are meaningless; the good in both is in harmony and eternal because it is good. 

The historical development of the Renaissance illustrates how this development actually occurred. 

The Renaissance 

The vernacular term “Renaissance” refers to the more specific Golden Renaissance, beginning in Italy in the fourteenth century and expanding to the rest of Europe in the following two centuries. It was actually the fifth in a series of renaissances that attempted to restore classical culture to its original flourishing in Ancient Greece and Rome. These prior “mini renaissances” flourished in the courts of Justinian, Charlemagne, Otto I, and Frederick II, all of whom bore the title “Caesar” (Kaiser in German) and attempted cultural revival as part of a larger program of political revival of the Roman Empire. 

The renaissance that we today term the Renaissance, by contrast, had its origins not among emperors, but among the scholarly class of Northern Italy. It was an organic development, the product of many factors. The prior renaissances preserved Greek and Roman manuscripts through copying, giving scholars access to the classics. The Medieval Church’s development of universities, created great libraries and a new class of academics. The Castilian conquest of Córdoba in 1236 acquired the great library assembled by the Arab rulers, and disseminated the collection throughout Europe, including many Greek works previously thought lost, including those of Aristotle. And the relative independence of the cities of Northern Italy, separated from the German Emperor by the Alps, combined with their great wealth from the Mediterranean trade gave rise to private wealth and with it the luxury of studying arts and antiquities. 

The Renaissance was a cultural transformation that manifested itself most profoundly in three areas: the visual arts, literature, and philosophy. 

Throughout the Middle Ages, the Byzantine court, as the surviving remnant of the Roman Empire, was regarded in the West as the center of civilization. Thus, Western art followed Byzantine aesthetics, with rigid, two-dimensional, highly stylized figures and focus on symbolism rather than realistic depiction. 

The Renaissance saw a renewal of proportional depiction in the human form, recapturing the lifelikeness in classical sculpture. This change began in religious art with Giotto di Bondone (c. 1267-1337), and also Cimabue (c. 1240-1302) and Taddeo Gaddi (c. 1290-1366), which rejected the stylized Byzantine models. Instead, they depicted figures as three-dimensional, with expressions, gestures, and clothing depicted from observation. The viewer is made part of the scene, with characters naturally depicted in different orientations, as the viewer would see them in life. Giotto’s work shows the influence of the sculptor Arnolfo di Cambio (c. 1240-1310), whose works are the first of the time to follow classical models with natural depiction of figures and clothing. From these beginnings the revival of classical aesthetics in art reached its full flowering in the glorious quattrocento with Fra Lippo Lippi (1406-1469), his student Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510), Andrea Mantegna (1431-1506), and culminating in the great works of Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) and Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564).  

The transition to Classical models in the visual arts does not represent a break from Christian artistic traditions, but rather a shift in perspective within the same paradigm. The Byzantine aesthetic was allegorical, meant to convey an impression of the divine beyond the mortal surface. Because eternity lies beyond time, angels and saints were shown in a stasis of perfect serenity and bliss – no movement, no trace of mortality. The Renaissance artists, by contrast, took to heart the idea of man as imago viva Dei – the living image of God.  

Depiction of human figures as they were, in all their temporality and mortality, was neither idolatry nor a rejection of the divine, but a faithful depiction of the divine as manifest in His creation. In this way Classical aesthetics informed the Christian worldview and vice versa and achieved beautiful harmony.