Occidentology Part II: The Renaissance

In the etymology of the term “Renaissance” one finds that it derives from the Old French renaissance, literally meaning “rebirth,” and ultimately the roots of which lie in the Latin term renasci which breaks down into “re,” denoting again and nasci, evoking the idea to be born — thus the term connoting “to be born again” — the archa-paradigmical idea of cyclical return and regeneration. Metaphysically speaking, renaissance diffuses the perfume of archetypal renewal; however, the word has been profanised due to the historical phenomena of renaissance, which, far from being a restoration of traditional supra-human principles, pertains to an insidious simulacrum of rebirth – a pseudo renewal that is divorced from its vertical axis, the pole of transcendence and is confined to the horizontal domain of dispersion, dissolution and death. The historical phenomena that inaugurated the end of man marks a rupture from the so-called “Dark Ages” of medieval Europe initiating the dawn of modernity, a period characterized by the triumph of humanism, scientific inquiry and artistic flourishing. It is the reign of quantity – the subordination of the sacred to profane as the intellectus is reduced to ratio and knowledge is replaced by facts. Renaissance, rather than recovering the luminous heritage of ancient Greece, is the rebirth of the promethean man who leads the dissolution of the Western civilisation. Perry writes in Western Civilization: A Brief History:

“The word renaissance means ‘rebirth,’ and it is used to refer to the attempt by artists and thinkers to recover and apply the ancient learning and standards of Greece and Rome. During the Renaissance, individuals showed an increasing concern for worldly life and self-consciously aspired to shape their destinies, an attitude that is the key to modernity”^[1].

In Crisis of the Modern World, Guénon argues that the Renaissance was not a rebirth, but a death — a severing from metaphysical roots and a descent into profane humanism. The ancients, even in their intellectual decadence, retained an orientation toward the Sacred. The Renaissance, by contrast, turned definitively toward the human and the terrestrial:

“What is called the Renaissance was in reality not a re-birth but the death of many things; on the pretext of being a return to the Greco-Latin civilization, it merely took over the most outward part of it… Men were indeed concerned to reduce everything to purely human proportions, to eliminate every principle of a higher order, and, one might say, symbolically to turn away from the heavens under pretext of conquering the earth”^[2].

The Renaissance is falsely lauded as a reawakening of classical ideals. It echoes a principial apostasia from the sacrosanct orientation, towards the Absolute, that constituted the very essence of Christian Weltanschauung and ancient mythic cosmologies. Within both of these expressions of single reality, the human state is only one state primordially integrated within a hierophanic and hierarchical order, wherein all entities are manifestations and theophanies, deriving their meaning from archa-paradigmical principles beyond the manifest domain. Be it the sacred Christian conception of a divine Logos immanent and yet infinitely beyond creation, or the primordial cosmological vision of antiquity wherein the terrestrial sphere is nothing save a reflection of the celestial through an immutable vertical chain of correspondences, the orientation was always hierarchic, directed toward the Supreme Principle. The Renaissance robbed man of this vision as he severed himself from the metaphysical and oriented himself toward the physical. The deviation signified not only a volcanic turmoil in the intellectual temperament but also initiated man into the abyss itself. The occlusion of the Divine in the final analysis made man god. Hamid Parsania, in Existence and the Fall, articulates this point with great precision:

“While the Renaissance was indeed a circumvention of Christianity and a throwback to pre-Christian times, it was not a full return to the true context of Hellenic culture and civilisation. The latter was mythological in nature… The post-Renaissance western world on the other hand, had turned to a purely material and natural interpretation of man and the world”^[3].

It was precisely the sophists’ thought of the Greeks and the Roman art that the individuals of the Renaissance revered and hence their perception of the Middle ages was of darkness, wherein the intellect and the culture were in permanent eclipse.  They styled themselves in the revival of profane aesthetic modalities and the burgeoning desacralised spirit, thus incinerating the legacy of the Middle Ages. As Perry notes:

“Renaissance artists and writers were fascinated by the cultural forms of Greece and Rome; they sought to imitate classical style and to capture the secular spirit of antiquity. In the process, they broke with medieval artistic and literary forms. They valued the full development of human talent and expressed a new excitement about the possibilities of life in this world. This outlook represents a break with the Middle Ages and the emergence of modernity”^[4].

The displacement of tradition found its crowning moment in the emblematic expression of humanism, the very quintessence of the Renaissance. Heralding deracination from the hierophanic conception of reality vis-à-vis the desacralisation of knowledge. The cosmos – the hierophany of the divine and in a perpetually unio sympthatica with Him – was cataclysmically sundered from the universal principles and the theophanic order leaving it purely mechanical and an atomistic entity subject to empirical dissection and utilitarian exploitation. René Guénon in Crisis of the Modern Worldmasterfully describes the metaphysical apostasy of humanism as he writes:

“A word that rose to honor at the time of the Renaissance, and that summarized in advance the whole program of modern civilization is ‘humanism’. Men were indeed concerned to reduce everything to purely human proportions, to eliminate every principle of a higher order, and, one might say, symbolically to turn away from the heavens under pretext of conquering the earth; the Greeks, whose example they claimed to follow, had never gone as far in this direction, even at the time of their greatest intellectual decadence, and with them utilitarian considerations had at least never claimed the first place, as they were very soon to do with the moderns….Humanism was the first form of what has subsequently become contemporary secularism; and, owing to its desire to reduce everything to the measure of man as an end in himself, modern civilization has sunk stage by stage until it has reached the level of the lowest elements in man and aims at little more than satisfying the needs inherent in the material side of his nature, an aim that is in any case quite illusory since it constantly creates more artificial needs than it can satisfy”^[5].

Merry Perry in The Western Civilization: A Brief History writes the following describing the phenomena of humanism:

“Humanism, the most characteristic intellectual movement of the Renaissance, was an educational and cultural program based on the study of ancient Greek and Roman literature. The humanist attitude toward antiquity differed from that of medieval scholars, who had taken pains to fit classical learning into a Christian world-view. Renaissance humanists did not subordinate the classics to the requirements of Christian doctrines … In contrast to scholastic philosophers, who used Greek philosophy to prove the truth of Christian doctrines, Italian humanists used classical learning to nourish their new interest in a worldly life”^[6].

In the desacralised, artistic efflorescence of the Renaissance — whether in architecture, painting, literature or the nascent sciences — one indeed encounters an art imbued with humanism. The artists of the Renaissance stand as emblematic of this new orientation away from the divine, exhibiting a luciferean brilliance that dazzles and sorcerifies the exterior faculties. Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man is the profane geometric study of the human body that typifies promethean man as the measure of all things and thereby reducing all quality to quantity. The theoncentric pontifex became god himself. Moreover, Da Vinci’s painting of Mona Lisa celebrates the individual person as a worthy subject – an empirical ego that portrays a vortex of the subtle forces of the psyche. The renaissancian artists meticulously rendered the human physiognomy and emotive particularity by an addictive fixation on the purely corporeal aspect of man. As the doors to the heavens were closed its indefinite spherical reverberations went everywhere, the spirit which imbued all of the traditional world – specifically the middle ages, epitomized in the cathedral – departed, leaving all art as a decaying corpse.

The same spirit of humanism was also present in renaissancian literature magnifying the individual personality, secular life and worldly experience. Francesco Petrarch, known as the father of humanism in his work Canzoniere inaugurates the worship of the emotional self by exploring the egoic love and the inner emotional life that initiated the birth of the “Renaissance self” divorced from the Sacred and all metaphysical principles.

In describing the renaissancian art Merry Perry writes the following:

“…Renaissance artists portrayed the individual character of human beings, captured the rich diversity of human personality, produced the first portraits since Roman times, and affixed their signatures to their works. Renaissance writers probed their own feelings and manifested a self-awareness that characterizes the modern outlook…Medieval art served a religious function: the world was a veil merely hinting at the other perfect and eternal world. Renaissance artists continued to utilize religious themes, but they shattered the dominance of religion over art by shifting attention from heaven to the natural world and to the human being. Renaissance artists depicted the human qualities of men and women and celebrated the beauty and grace of the human form. The reference was less to the other world and more to this world, and people were treated as creatures who found their spiritual destiny as they fulfilled their human one…The Renaissance, then, marks the birth of modernity”^[7].

Figures such as Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola may have attempted to reconcile Platonic metaphysics with Christian doctrine; however, the intellectual climate of the Renaissance, predicated upon rationalism and empiricism, would not allow that to happen. Severing reason from revelation was the defining feature of modernity and it forever changed the trajectory of the western civilisation.

The ascendency of the post-lapsarian man gave birth to another pernicious idea, namely progress, that would imbue all aspects of western civilisation. The idea of progress is the over-optimistic and pseudo-intellectual belief that human civilisation is capable of continuous, cumulative improvement without any presence of the Divine. It was precisely the pseudo-principles of rational inquiry, scientific method, and enlightened moral reasoning that crystalised the illusion of a perpetual, advancing society that is always “better” than its predecessors. The truth is that it is impossible to be divorced from the Sacred vis-à-vis abandoning the metaphysical principles and spiritual hierarchy in favour of humanism, materialism, relativism and an empirical egoic rationality.  It must be emphasized that the modern idea of progress is an illusion – the western civilisation is not progressing at all; rather, it is disintegrating and moving towards its dissolution.

It is therefore necessary to re-examine the Renaissance not merely through the lens of historical achievement but from the perspective of metaphysical decline. The brilliance of its art and the grandeur of its architecture conceal a more profound disorientation: the loss of symbolic vision, the profanation of knowledge and the enthronement of man in place of the Divine. The so-called rebirth was, in truth, the stillbirth of sacred consciousness in the modern West.

Thus concludes our reflection on the Renaissance as the second part of our two-part study of Occidentology. Here we repeat that the Renaissance, rather than rebirth, was in reality the death of metaphysics. In tracing the arc from the Hellenic cosmos to the humanist turn of the Renaissance, we have sought to expose the metaphysical fault lines beneath the surface of historical change. Only by confronting the roots of Western modernity can a genuine restoration of metaphysical order be envisioned.

^[1] Perry, Marvin. Western Civilization: A Brief History. 7th ed., Wadsworth Publishing, p. 186.

^[2] Guénon, René. The Crisis of the Modern World. Tr. Marco Pallis, Arthur Osborne, Richard C. Nicholso, Sophia Perennis, p. 15.

^[3] Parsania, Hamid Tr. Shuja Ali Mirza. Existence and the Fall. ICAS, p. 72

^[4] Perry, Marvin. Western Civilization: A Brief History. 7th ed., Wadsworth Publishing, p. 186.

^[5] Guénon, René. The Crisis of the Modern World. Translated by Marco Pallis, Arthur Osborne, Richard C. Nicholson , Sophia Perennis, p. 17.

^[6] Perry, Marvin. Western Civilization: A Brief History. 7th ed., Wadsworth Publishing, p. 189,192.

^[7] Ibid