The West Awakes

By Geoffrey Gibson

This book deals with three phases of the history of the West (now including the U S) known as the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment. The rebirth commenced largely in Florence. It was followed by what was traditionally called the High Renaissance centred in Rome. The spiritual Reformation exploded hotly in Germany. It was followed by a very cold version in Geneva. Typically, the English went their own perverse non-European way. There the reformation had almost nothing to do with religion, and everything to do with politics. History has not paid enough attention to the impact of this attainment of religious Home Rule on the later revolutions in England.
The German philosopher, Kant, said that enlightenment is our emergence from our self-incurred immaturity. The Enlightenment is the name given to the period following the events under the umbrella of renaissance and reformation when thinkers and artists focussed more on man than gods, and the quest for freedom became doctrinaire. The book also looks at German classical music and the birth of the U S.
The book follows all these themes through the life stories of the main players. It is 65,000 words, and fully annotated.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Geoffrey Gibson
• Release date: Jun 13, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310307812

Geoffrey Gibson

Geoffrey Gibson is an Australian writer living with the Wolf - his dog - in a kind of rural peace one hour out of Melbourne, the home of his football team, the Melbourne Storm. He has practised law as either a member of the Bar or a major international law firm. He has presided over at least one statutory tribunal for nearly thirty years and he has conducted arbitrations or mediations in Australia and the U S. He has published five books before on the theory and practice of the law, A Journalist's Companion to Australian Law (Melbourne University Press); The Arbitrator's Companion (Federation Press); Law for Directors (Federation Press); The Making of a Lawyer (What They Didn't Teach You at Law School) (Hardie Grant); and The Common Law - A History (Australian Scholarly Publishing)). He is now focussing on writing in general history, philosophy, and literature, fields that he was trained in and that he has pursued over very many Summer Schools at Cambridge, Harvard, and Oxford universities. His twelve eBooks so far published include five volumes of A History of the West - The Ancient West; The Medieval West; The West Awakes; Revolutions in the West; and Twentieth Century West; Confessions of a Babyboomer; Confessions of a Barrister; Parallel Trials, Socrates and Jesus; The English Difference, The Tablets of their Laws; The German Nexus, The Germans in English History; The Humility of Knowledge, Five Geniuses and God; and Windows on Shakespeare. The photo is not great, but at least the Wolf comes out OK.

Book preview

THE WEST AWAKES

VOLUME III

OF

A HISTORY OF THE WEST

By Geoffrey Gibson

****

Published by:

Geoffrey Gibson at Smashwords

Copyright (c) 2014 by Geoffrey Gibson

****

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Smashwords Edition Licence Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

****

TO MY ARTICLED CLERKS AND OTHERS AT BLAKES.

Patronage at its best calls for the exercize of creative hypocrisy…In Van Eyck’s masterpiece, The Adoration of the Lamb, the burghers of Antwerp who had made money enough from butchery and wool to pay for a place in the picture, assemble outside a transfigured version of their golden city, in an exuberant countryside, to worship the sacrificial lamb of God (clearly a good market beast)….Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice is a more specifically urban mystery of the Renaissance, transforming money-grubbing greed and murderous aggression into the pursuit of perfection in a golden world….Shakespeare shared with Freud the insight that all events have an intimate as well as a public history. He shared with Jung an awareness of the impersonal imaginative inheritance that has come down to us from the more remote past.

J P Brockbank, On Shakespeare

Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another. This immaturity is self-incurred if its cause is not lack of understanding, but lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of another.

Immanuel Kant, An Answer to the Question: ‘What is enlightenment?’

CONTENTS

Prologue

Protesters

Dominic, Francis, Hus, Wycliffe

The Status Quo

The Renaissance Popes

Florence

Rome and Venice

Michelangelo, Raphael, Leonardo, Giorgione, Titian, Machiavelli and Galileo

Germany

Durer, Luther, Kant, Goethe, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Marx

England

Cromwell, More, Shakespeare, Milton, Coke, Mansfield, Newton, Darwin

Switzerland

Calvin, Rousseau

Spain

Cervantes, El Greco, Goya

Holland

Erasmus, Spinoza, Rembrandt

France

Montaigne, Descartes, and Voltaire

United States

Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Lincoln, Holmes

Epilogue

CHRONOLOGY

1187 Saladin takes Jerusalem

1194 Dominic made a priest

1226 St Francis dies

1266 Giotto born

1295 Marco Polo back in Venice

1309 Papal court at Avignon

1321 Dante dies

1323 Spirituals confirm poverty and condemned as heretics

1328 Ockham excommunicated

1349 Black Death rages

1378 Schism – pope at Avignon

1381 Peasants’ Revolt in England

1384 Death of Wyclif

1436 Hussites settle with church

1452 Leonardo born

1453 Constantinople falls to Turks

1471 Sixtus IV elected

1479 Grievances of Assembly of Coblenz

1492 Alexander VI pope. Columbus in America

1498 Savonarola executed

1503 Julius II elected

1509 Henry VIII king

1510 Giorgione dies

1513 Leo II pope. The Prince written

1519 Luther at Wittenberg. Leonardo dies.

1520 Raphael dies.

1523 Clement VII elected.

1527 Sack of Rome. Machiavelli dies.

1528 The Book of the Courtier (Castiglione). Death of Durer.

1535 More executed.

1536 Erasmus dies

1539 Society of Jesus formed.

1540 Death of Thomas Cromwell.

1541 El Greco born.

1546 Death of Luther.

1564 Shakespeare born. Michelangelo dies. Calvin dies.

1576 Titian dies.

1580 Publication of Montaigne’s Essays.

1614 El Greco dies.

1616 Shakespeare and Cervantes die.

1632 Spinoza born

1633 Dialogue of Galileo condemned by Roman Inquisition.

1634 Death of Coke.

1637 Descartes’ Discourse on the Method Published.

1642 Death of Galileo.

1649 Execution of Charles I.

1663 Church bans the works of Descartes.

1669 Death of Rembrandt.

1674 New York renamed. Death of Milton.

1677 Spinoza dies.

1687 Pricipia Mathematica.

1724 Kant born.

1727 Death of Newton

1746 Goya born.

1750 Death of Bach.

1770 Beethoven born.

1776 Declaration of Independence.

1778 Death of Rousseau.

1790 Death of Franklin

1791 Death of Mozart.

1793 Death of Mansfield.

1797 Death of Washington

1828 Goya dies.

1832 Goethe dies.

1846 Jefferson dies

1848 Communist Manifesto.

1859 Origin of Species

1865 Death of Lincoln

1881 The Common Law of O W Holmes

1882 Death of Darwin.

1883 Marx dies.

1932: Retirement of Justice Holmes.

PROLOGUE

This book looks at our emancipation from our self –inflicted immaturity, as described by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (on the inscription page). It looks at our attempts to think for ourselves, freed from the control of others. It also looks at the insight that Shakespeare shared with Freud, that events – that is, people – have an intimate as well as a public history.

The two notions are related. We like to see every single person as having their own dignity, and not just some form of identity. People did not tend to think that way in the ancient or medieval world. If you want to put a tag on it, even a dodgy one, we will be looking at the arrival of the individual. We will also look at the creative hypocrisy commented on by J P Brockbank. Who, if anyone, stood behind the movers and shakers that carried us into, for better or for worse, the modern world?

We shall look at events that for the most part come within phases of our history that have been labelled the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment. The first phase concerns the rediscovery of the art and thought of the ancient world, and an outburst of artistic creativity that centred mainly in the Italian cities of Florence, Rome, and Venice - and which may have been as explosive as that which took place in Athens in the fifth century BC.

The second phase deals with the protest at the corruption that had engulfed the head-quarters of the Church. As we may now think may have been predictable, the spiritual revolt occurred in Germany, and the political revolt occurred in England. The two chains of events were for the most part unconnected, but the Universal church was no more, and we may still observe the effect of the schism or split in the North – South divide in European Union today.

The third phase deals with breakthroughs in philosophy, when that term included science and when the amateur might expect to be able to understand all that was known about us or the world, and the realisation that tolerance, especially religious tolerance, might be a virtue. We will look for what modern managers call the drivers of the Enlightenment in France, Germany, Holland, and England.

You may come to see a common thread of emancipation in the forces involved in these phases – especially when we reflect back on the fetters and chains laid on most people in the ancient and medieval worlds.

It is a bit late now to complain about these terms, but they may not do much to clear up our thinking. Neither people nor our story of what they did – what we call history – is cut and dried, or capable of being put in boxes. We rightly suspect people who want to do that to us. For the most part, the leading forces did not march under these banners. Michelangelo did not proclaim the Renaissance; Martin Luther did not say that it was time to start the Reformation; and Kant did not say he was there to crown the Enlightenment (Aufklarung).

People did what they did. Others made a record of their deeds. Others analysed those records and put labels on how they saw trends develop, like waves in the ocean. Every step along the away is a step away from reality. In truth, the attitudes and drives and aptitudes that led to the three phases that we have labelled were in evidence well before and outside the times and areas we generally look to. None of them was started by people from Mars. They came from us. For example, what we label ‘humanism’ is but an example of the trend that we call the ‘enlightenment.’ One is said to have come before the Renaissance, or to be embodied in it; the other is said to have come after it. Who cares?

For the most part we will try to avoid using any of those terms and any discussion of phases or trends or anything else that takes our focus off what real people did and said. For the want of a better suggestion, we will look at events over nearly one thousand years by looking at what people did country by country. There is no logic behind that approach – it just seems to me to be as good a way as any to tell what is a gripping story, and to suggest the limitations that might follow from the intellectual sloppiness imposed by doctrinal orderliness – and, frankly, a decent load of intellectual snobbery. We also need to broaden our horizon if we are to get to a reasonable history of the West at large.

I will make a further attempt to keep the discussion grounded. I will try to limit my discussion of pieces of art or architecture to those that I have seen on the ground. When it comes to philosophy, literature, music, or theatre, I will confine myself to what I have available here at home (in recorded performance for the last two). The same goes for the law.

First we need to look at the status quo in the church and some early forms of protest or dissent. We will do so in reverse order, since we have previously looked at the state of the church at the end of what we call the Middle Ages.

At that time, the church had something in common with a big telephone company running a monopoly. It had lost touch with what we call consumers or end users. They distrusted it and they hated it and they believed, correctly, that those running it were generally interested in themselves and not in what we call stakeholders. They were said to have forgotten their mission, to be too big for their boots, and to be rolling around in other people’s money that they hoarded for the benefit of a tiny but crooked, or at least firmly bent, elite.

Nowadays we get some level of consumer protection from the law, although these telco’s are now so big that most governments are scared of them, and we even get shareholders revolting – through other big institutional shareholders – and calling on the corporation to consider showing some humanity. (Just think – it used to be part of the Post-Master General’s department.)

If humans are to aspire to be above the level of sheep, you expect protest. One measure of our maturity is our ability to accept and respond to protest – compare now England, France, or Germany with Russia, Turkey, or Saudi Arabia. Two people who showed their unease at the way that the church was going became saints – Dominic and Francis. Others – like William of Ockham, Wyclif, and Hus – were not so well regarded. Shakespeare gave a chilling account of the mob at work in his description of the uprising led by Jack Cade in Henry VI Part II.

The story of the church at about the time where this book cuts in is miserable. It is as good a case as you can get for the proposition that all power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The names of what are called the Renaissance Popes live for the most part in infamy. We will need to look briefly at them to understand their part in the revolt against the church – and in patronising the flowering of the arts, a welter of ‘creative hypocrisy.’

As it happens, it was under two of these popes that the two lines intersected with a geometric inevitability that would have charmed Euclid. Julius II was the great patron of Michelangelo. He would stun Europe by riding forth to war in front of the papal army. He also stunned his flock by deciding to demolish the basilica at St Peter’s and replacing it with a monument mighty enough to match the pride of Rome – and himself. Michelangelo would design the pope’s, tomb, thirty-six feet high with forty statues larger than life, and two angels. Presumably Julius saw nothing in the Sermon on the Mount which might suggest that this pride and love of mammon may give rise to some difficulty en route to the tomb.

Julius in his haste discarded the build-up of centuries of artefacts and relics. Then he got hit by costs over-runs. The church had to sell more indulgences. They were already the subject of outrage. The next pope, Leo X, pushed the racket into Germany. He granted an indulgence to enable work on the historic building to go on. His main bag man in Germany was a Dominican called Tetzel. He really provoked the Germans. One of them, a priest called Martin Luther, on 31 October 1517 nailed to the door of a church in Wittenberg his famous ninety-five theses on the sale of indulgences. Some religious people might see something almost divine in that kind of symmetry. Religious people and art-lovers who stand in awe of St Peter’s may forget that it arose when the universal church came to an end.

That leaves us to start on the rediscovery of the classic world in Italy. The star turn here is Florence and we need to look at why that republic played such a role in our story.

Then we come to the rise of the artist. The three biggest hitters, with egos to match those of their patrons, are Michelangelo, Raphael, and Leonardo. The others we look at include Giorgione, Botticelli, and Titian. Otherwise, Italy will have to wait for Verdi and Puccini for their day in the sun – and some still like to look down their noses at Puccini. You need to bear in mind that the nation of Germany had to wait until about the same time to be born.

Machiavelli looked at politics for what it was and gave his name to what is otherwise called realpolitik. He is a reminder that national glory in art gives no assurance to your politics – just look at Greece and Italy, nursing past glory into basket cases of the twentieth century.

Then there is the tragic clash between the church and Galileo that in large part arose out of a desire to read the bible as dictating necessary truths in astronomy. There you have a definitive case of the old world against the new, and Galileo was fortunate not to be burnt at the stake. It is a preview of the fool that the church would make of itself with Darwin – an error that is unrepentantly perpetuated by many claiming to represent the church in the U S today.

The Germans have only one representative here in art and one in religion. Duhrer had an ego to match that of the Italians, and he also had a dark side that allowed Kenneth Clarke to ventilate his antipathy to the Germans. The good thing about Luther is that he does not leave you wondering where he may be coming from. He was very human, and down to earth. If we say that indulgences caused the refuse to hit the regenerator, he would just say that the shit hit the fan. He still arouses heat, and, like Cromwell, there are things about him that even his admirers blanch at.

Kant was a neat and tidy man, I suspect a possible bore at the lunch that he gave each day – with a decanter of wine for each guest – and to read most of his work is like going fifteen rounds with a cement mixer. But his moral philosophy is to my mind about all that is left of substance after two and a half millennia of philosophy. Goethe stands for intellectual and literary genius, but sadly his work has not travelled in translation. Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven created the music of the West, what we call classical music, and for many, no one else has come even close since.

Four men of genius shaped the thinking of much of the twentieth century. Three of them were German Jews - Marx, Einstein, and Freud, who all quit Germany – and the other was an Englishman, Charles Darwin. We have therefore in this chapter an insight into what old style football commentators may have called the mercurial nature of the remarkable German character.

We will be cooler about the two Swiss thinkers. Calvin comes across as cold-blooded, and intellectually desiccated, a man destined to bring studied gloom into the lives of those who could not answer him back. Why jump off a ship that you think is overloaded with doctrine and dogma if you are just going to climb straight back on board another?

Rousseau is the reverse. Here is the Romantic revolt against classical thinking, a man so used to putting himself over everyone in his private life that he thought that he could do so in what passed for his thinking. Carlyle called him the Evangelist in the French Revolution. He stands for a denial of logic and principle, and is likely to be found in the shadow of a lot of falsity about life or art. He gave the green light to politicians to say what they like, even if it is obviously silly, like ‘Man was born free, but is everywhere in chains.’

Rather to my surprise, the English are a mixed bag. With Thomas Cromwell, we have an architect of the English revolt against Rome, and a kind of modern government, and the doubtful benefit of a kind of nationalism of which Saint Thomas More was one of the first victims. Shakespeare is our Everest. Milton had an extraordinary political career, and was lucky to come out alive, and, when he was blind, he wrote a mighty epic poem that may be the most beautiful in our language. He sought to justify God to man, by an idea that many now think is as outrageous as it is untenable. (Were Milton and Bach the last great artists to dedicate work to God?)

Coke and Mansfield were very great men, and great champions of that gift of England to the world that we call the common law. Newton was inarguably one of the brightest men who ever lived. He founded modern physics, but as a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, he could not understand the doctrine of the trinity. Charles Darwin was a man of the most compelling intellectual courage and integrity. Hopefully, his work has stopped theologians fishing in other peoples’ ponds.

Cervantes stands for Spain and Europe, as Dante does for Italy and Europe, and Shakespeare does for England and Europe. Don Quixote is seen as the first novel, and is regularly voted by writers to be the best. Here, as in Shakespeare, you get a feeling of talking what used to be called ‘man to man’ with for some a vague sense that somehow God may be part of the discussion. He is an essential part