Let’s take a whistle-stop tour of the ideas and philosophies of the Renaissance (1350-1600).
Religious ideas
A cleavage appeared between boring scholastic theology and the new sciences which sought to explain the world rationally and by experiment. The humanists of the Renaissance preferred the thinkers of Antiquity who deployed reason, rather than the Medieval thinkers who were mired in abstruse theological abstraction. Tedious scholastic philosophy and the ideas of eccentrics such as the Spanish mystic St John of the Cross, were later blown into the air by Luther and John Calvin. Calvin was a Protestant who believed in predestination and everything that implies. His bizarre version of Protestantism was taken up in Geneva, and also influenced West Germany, France and Scotland.
The sciences
Sciences developed at pace at the universities. Bologna is the earliest, founded back in 1088, and many others in Italy and further afield (Oxford, Cambridge and La Sorbonne) followed soon after. Copernicus from Prussia put the sun at the centre of the solar system in the early 1500s, which would be demonstrated by Galileo with his telescope a century later. And Kepler developed laws of planetary motion which would pave the way for Newton’s theory of gravity. Many thinkers also worked as alchemists – in pursuit of gold and potions for eternal life – which helped push forward the field of chemistry. The Renaissance was really an explosion of passion for knowledge.
Renaissance man
Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) was the archetypal polymathic “Renaissance man”, uomo universale, with a thirst for knowledge and ideas and he dedicated himself to painting, sculpture, inventions and much besides. He left us fascinating notebooks of his designs and thoughts about life – from the optimistic “As a day well spent brings happy sleep, so a life well used brings happy death” to his bleak “We are deceived by promises and deluded by time, and death derides our cares; life’s anxieties are naught”.
Erasmus and Sir Thomas More
The humanist Erasmus wrote “In Praise of Folly” (in Latin of course) criticising the superstitions and the corruptions of the church, with a series of satirical speeches by the goddess Folly praising the corruption and stupidity around her. Sir Thomas More, whose head was depicted by the portrait artist of the time Hans Holbein, and who lost it for the treason of not recognizing Henry VIII’s new Church of England, wrote the little treatise ‘Utopia’ in Latin, not an enjoyable read but containing some very modern and socialist ideas: no consumerism or fetish of commodities or money, children would grow out of playing with jewellery, freedom of religion, and education for all.
Machiavelli was the very opposite of an idealist. His concern was how to navigate the dirty world of politics – his “The Prince” (Il Principe) is a guidebook for Italian rulers of how to survive and prosper.
Essayists
Montaigne’s volume of “Essais” at the end of the 1500s are wonderful, characterized by their intelligence, honesty and modesty, including “Of the Education of Children” and “Of Vanity”.
And Francis Bacon produced a similar set of essays in England. Bacon was a scientist and philosopher who stood for experiments being the arbiters of truth, rather than taking anything on authority, and laid out this point in his “The Advancement of Learning”.
