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History is in a bad
mood, as reflected in its acting troupe, the human
race. What goes for the
micro of an individual human
personality also seems true for group. We have our bright
moments, or years, and our
darker ones and cycles within cycles of these and even sometimes bright and dark at the same moment.
I am reflecting this week on Stephen Greenblatt's
book, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, which concerns itself with the mood of Europe in the early 1400s, but in particular
the career of one Poggio Bracciolini, a poor boy whose beautiful handwriting took him to the center of power as secretary-scribe
to the first Pope John XXIII (deposed and de-Poped), and later as key agent
to unlocking the lost
secrets of classical antiquity.
(Apologies if I have already lost
you in this week's departure from my usual
japery).
The depravity of the
late medieval church hierarchy, and its sick grasp
on the totality of everyday
life a thousand years after the fall of Rome, is the outstanding feature of the period. What started out in Judea as a humble cult in thrall to the new idea of God-given grace, degenerated into a vile whoredom of concentrated wealth devoted to the routine
infliction of cruelties. Poggio
was especially struck by the fate of one radical reformer, Jerome of Prague, persecuted as
a heretic. Jerome had made a career of inciting subversion in his wide travels around the universities of
Europe, and was constantly
in trouble with the church
establishment.
Around 1415 Jerome ventured
to the Council of Constance in Germany where cardinals, archbishops, and other church poobahs had gathered
to resolve a vexing
administrative problem: the schism
that had one Pope in
Avignon, France, and another in Rome, each answering to different kingdoms of Europe.
In the course of things, Jerome
the reformer made a pest of himself
and was branded a heretic, thus nominating himself as a
candidate for gruesome execution.
Poggio witnessed Jerome's defense of his actions and beliefs before the council higher-ups, which were delivered in Latin with an eloquence not displayed since the days of Cicero. Jerome was eventually burned at the stake anyway, but the heroic power of his rhetoric made an impression on Poggio.
In the course of things
at Constance, Poggio's
patron, so-called "anti-Pope" John XXIII,
a.k.a. Baldassarre Cossa,
got kicked out of the
club and Poggio was released from his duties to pursue his true
life ambition, which was
the rescue of forsaken manuscripts from the high
culture of the Roman empire which lay moldering in the vaults and attics of monasteries all over the continent. He traveled far and wide in all weathers and seasons in a time when even the best roads were little
more than mule tracks.
The indifferent monks let
him poke around their storerooms and in cases where he could not purchase a dusty scroll outright, he either pilfered them, or copied them out laboriously in his beautifully clear Carolingian handwriting.
In rescuing the works such as the complete orations of Cicero,
the Epicurian discourse of
Lucretius (De Rerum Natura - On the Nature of Things),
as well as the practical
dissertations of Vitruvius on architecture and Frontinus on the Roman aqueducts,
he opened the door to the revival of human
spirit that we call the
Renaissance. If you look closely
at the artifacts of the
centuries pre-dating the Renaissance, you detect a long-running mood of severe psychological depression when the human race dwelt in abject hopelessness
and poverty, with only the hocus-pocus of the church promising better times beyond the mystery of death as the Zoloft of the day. Poggio was not alone in his enthusiasm for the lost world
of the ancients, and eventually
the rediscovery of a realm
of ideas beyond the drear preoccupations of a corrupt church turned on a light for humanity that has burned for five hundred years.
I mention these old and arcane matters because the mood of humanity lately seems to be darkening
again, and to some large degree for understandable reasons. Between the melting of the polar icecaps,
the destruction of all edible life in the oceans, and the vulgar
spectacle of the paved-over American landscape with its clown monuments mocking all
civilized endeavor, and a
long list of other insults to healthy life on earth, there's a lot to be depressed about. We stand to lose a proportional amount of human capital accumulated over
the past five hundred years as the benighted people
of post-Roman Europe lost, and it
may take us a thousand years or more to recover - if we recover at all.
It's especially disturbing
to see the infiltration of the latest
version of Jesus mumbo-jumbo
- Southern Republican Nascar
Evangelical orthodoxy - take over the collective mind
of the USA. The poverty of ideas
this represents can't be overstated
and the timidity of any
opposition to it is a disgrace to our heritage. Maybe that's an argument for electing
a Mormon president, since
that peculiar branch of the church is so self-evidently
childish and ridiculous that it will
probably do more to defeat
religious fanaticism than all the humanist
dissertations ever written
- or a thousand clones of Madonna Ciccone dancing in stadiums under laser beams in titanium brassieres.
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